In case you missed it like I did. LTE and WiMax not technically 4G
First things first. I was tipped by this article “T-Mobile roasts AT&T in debut of ‘Largest 4G Network’ campaign” A good read talking about how T-Mobile is launching a new ad campaign that spoofs Apple’s Mac vs. Windows ads. In these ads they are now claiming to have the largest 4G network. Here is the spoof:
Upon finding out that Sprint WiMax and Verizon LTE aren’t technically 4G I proceeded to do what most people do when they read a once unbeknownst fact online. Look it up on Wikipedia (I also did a Google search to confirm what I found there) Here is what a couple hours of reading and searching found.
The news broke in Geneva on Oct 21st. When the ITU-R (International Telecommunications Union – Radiocommunication Sector) set the standards that a technology has to meet in order to earn their approval as a true 4G technology.
The entry in Wikipedia actually does a good job explaining things if you are a computer programmer or at least understand the lingo, which I don’t. It amazes me that someone or a group of people take the time to amass a Wikipedia article with such technical detail.
In terms that I understand that I will now bestow upon you now. ITU-R was dragging their feet in defining the standards for 4G and when they finally did, 100mb/s roaming and 1Gb/s stationary/local connectivity, the current WiMax and soon to be launched LTE networks didn’t meet those standards. WiMax and LTE are faster than current 3G standards, but are more like 3.9G or pre-4G.
After having already labeled and advertised their upgraded networks as being 4G they weren’t going to retract their 4G badges and T-Mobile will now actually add one.
How fast these technologies are and how they are delivered is where it gets a little wonky. There are now 3 competing technologies, hardware limitations, theoretical maximum and actual delivery speed of data. According to Wikipedia the theoretical limit of connectivity for WiMax is 128 mb/s and LTE at 100mb/s .
From what I can gather there is also a limitation on the hardware that a carrier uses to deliver the coverage. This article states that the WiMax towers can only handle up to 70 mb/s and furthermore Sprint caps the max rate to 10mb/s per user. Which actually delivers an average of around 3 mb/s.
With WiMax around 3 mb/s and HSPA+ somewhere around 5 mb/s on average these current technologies fall well short of the ITU-R’s standards. Even LTE’s which boasted 60 mb/s in limited testing is promising around 5-12 mb/s in a fully inhabited network.
There are technologies on the horizon (which do meet ITU-R’s 4G standards) LTE-Advanced and WiMax 2 that will arrive sometime in around 2012 and the networks could just keep calling it 4G service or because they are making an upgrade to the technology it will probably be 4G+ or 4G2. Until then companies will continue to call their networks 4G, which also now includes T-Mobile’s HSPA+.
In all honesty I agree with T-Mobile and the other carriers on this one. It doesn’t really matter if the ITU-R officially recognizes them with a standard that they just set. What only really matters is that they provide significantly faster speeds than the current 3G networks.
So, now when some wise guy says that your 4G branded phone technically isn’t 4G you will actually know what he is talking about.
