There are numerous misconceptions among people in my country of this new technology, no thanks to an internet service provider which named their Online buy “” service as 4G where it only uses a celular technology called “” Jelly Iburst. It’s very misleading during the initial period back in 2years. But I believe they are losing business as everyone now jumped ship to WiMax here. Back to the topic, what is 4G?

During the heydays of Nokia 3310, people are only limited to WAP based mobile internet. It was so limited and nobody bothered to surf net using their mobile back then. Few years later, phones with 65k colours TFT LCD are booming like mushrooms. There are at least few people used their phones to surf some WAP sites via GPRS/EDGE and that’s including me. The Sony Ericsson T610 is classic, serving me for 4years before I decided to retire it.

With the introduction of iPhone, the mobile industry was revolutionized. Mobile service provider is selling the phone with data package. It’s very enticing since most service provider absorbed the hefty price of the iPhone by signing up with the consumers with 1-2years contract(not in Malaysia, a 2year contract buy “” without prescription still cost a premium). Mobile provider take note of this idea and introduce it with other phones as well like the HTC android series. Although 3G was introduced many years before iPhone, not many afford to use this data service without a data plan. It was iPhone who revolutionize the service provider in providing affordable data plan + voice call + cheap phones (again, not in Malaysia).

What’s next after 3G? For your sake, it isn’t iZzi 4G network (refer to my intro paragraph). Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the next step after 3G. While it was only considered as pre-4G as it doesn’t meet some of the requirements to be adhered to the 4G specifications. Some countries already initiated trial and testing and branded it as 4G. Some of the countries including Stockholm and Oslo. The latest was Singapore where SingTel demo the technology by streaming HD content to a tablet PC.

LTE will be absorbed into 4G family though it doesn’t comply with the 4G standards. As far as business is concern, carriers will most likely to market it as 4G instead of “pre-4G” or “3.9G” which represents the correct term.

Here are the specifications of LTE:

• Downlink speed of 100Mbps.
• Uplink of 50Mbps
• idle to active at ~ 100ms
• reduced latency at 10ms
• IP based wireless network, no more analogue voice packet. Voice calls are being done via VOIP.
• IPv6 support. IPv4 no longer sufficient to sustain this much of connected device by then.

Basically, LTE is fall short of the bandwidth “” Professional requirements as 4G; downlink speed of 1Gbps when client is stationary and 100Mbps for mobile operation. And also the efficiency of the burst rate.

The true 4G technology will be LTE-Advance. Its specification were only finalized at late 2009.  Apart from that, mobile-WiMax is competing with LTE-Advance to get the nomenclature. I say, both will complement each other and hardware manufacturer will probably support both technology in the same package. In the mean time, HSDPA 3.5G is not even utilized fully. There are no killer applications that can take advantage of that massive bandwidth for mobile by factoring in the cost. Untill bandwidth becomes cheap, don’t try to watch Youtube HD on your mobile.

No Comments yet »