4G: Everything you need to know

What is 4G?
4G, as the name suggests, picks up where 3G (and 2G before it) left off. 4G stands for Forth Generation of Cellular Communications and is the next step in the evolution of mobile data.

4G is gaining momentum in the States, with Sprint’s 4G network and T-Mobile’s LTE network, but these aren’t true 4G networks – although the marketers don’t want you to know that. At present, they’re more like 3.75G, or late stage 3G. But the important thing is that these networks are ready to be upgraded to full 4G once it arrives.

In India, we’re slightly behind our American counterparts and won’t be getting anything that smells remotely like 4G until later this year.

Alcatel-Lucent Asia-Pacific President Rajeev Singh-Molares thinks India will be the first country in Asia to get 4G technology in the second quarter.

4G benefits
Probably the biggest benefit of 4G is that it will be upwards of 10 times faster than current 3G network speeds. The obvious benefit of this is that you’ll be able to do things faster, consume more media on your device and work harder – although not necessarily in that order.

Ed Richards, Ofcom’s chief executive, told UK radio station Radio 4 about the benefits of 4G:

“It offers much better data services and therefore all the kind of things you can get on broadband at home or in your office and that you aspire to do through your smartphone or tablet computer and so forth, that is exactly what 4G services will enable.”

Types of 4G
As we said earlier, any claims of a true 4G service in the US are false. These networks are merely late stage 3G networks (HSPA+) that will be upgradeable to 4G speeds once the technology is in place.

Overseeing all the futuristic speed is the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The ITU lists deems only two formats as “true 4G technologies”: LTE (Long Term Evolution Advanced) and WiMAX Release 2.

At present neither of these two “true 4G” networks are available. The US and Japan have LTE and WiMAX networks up and running.

T-Mobile’s US 4G network is HSPA+ at present, as is AT&T’s. Verizon’s is based on LTE, which will be upgradeable to LTEA once it becomes available. In addition to this, the vast majority of European networks have also committed to LTE, but it’ll still be awhile before we see any sort of 4G action in the UK.

According to reports, both AT&T and Verizon expect to have their LTE networks fully in place by 2013.

Sprint does things slightly different in the US and uses WiMAX, a combination of Clearwire’s 4G data network with Sprint’s 3G-voice network. Again, this is still late stage 3G (HSPA+), and not to be confused with true 4G.

Having said that, once WiMAX Release 2 is released – anytime from now to 2012 – networks using WiMAX Release 1 will be able to easily migrate over to WiMAX Release 2.

But for now, any network that says it has true 4G-coverage is lying – blame the people in marketing.

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