The International Telecommunication Union — the leading United Nations agency for information and communication technology issues — discussed about 4G, among other things, with the occasion of The World Radiocommunication Seminar 2010 held in Geneva, Switzerland at the beginning of December.

ITU has underlined that the term “4G” is considered to be referring to IMT-Advanced as part of the most evolved technologies, even though, while 4G is still undefined, it can be related to precursors such as LTE and WiMax together with more advanced 3G networks. According to ITU, “the detailed specifications of the IMT-Advanced technologies will be provided in a new ITU-R Recommendation expected in early 2012″. In the light of many recent carriers utilizing 4G denominations to describe their network data speed, ITU’s statement involving early 2012 specifications at least makes it clear that real 4G networks offering real 4G speeds are still a matter of future. Nevertheless, leaving room for LTE, WiMax and more advanced 3G networks could legitimize early 4G and HSPA+ terms to describe above CDMA2000 and HSPA performance. This is rather good news for T-Mobile who is utilizing and advertising high speed HSPA+ as it now can be enumerated among a broader 4G definition, falling under the “more advanced 3G networks” category.

IMT Advanced (aka systems beyond IMT 2000) is a technology concept belonging to International Mobile Telecommunications that would offer, anywhere in the next three to five years that it takes to implement, speeds of up to 100 Mbits/sec in high mobility applications and up to 1 Gbit/sec in low mobility or nomadic applications (those in which the location of the terminal may change but the terminal itself is stationary while in use).

Source: ITU, FreeWimaxInfo

Via: Engadget