CNET has a nice, easy-to-drink article on telecom terminology perfect for this lazy July day. One of the terms they try to define is 4G.
In their jargon glossary, CNET includes WiMax and LTE under the “4G” umbrella, and specifically refers to Sprint “using an older version of 4G called WiMax”.
I guess you can say mobile WiMax or 802.16e is an older version of 4G.
It depends on whether Sprint’s 4-6 Mbps average download speeds for its WiMax implementation meet the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU, as their known) original 4G requirements of peak download speeds of 100 Mbps.
About a year ago I was perturbed when Sprint-Clearwire started calling their WiMax network a 4G-level service. I attributed their labeling to be more of a marketing stroke than a technical leap.
WiMax, which is a kind of wireless Ethernet for the carrier world, has been around for awhile: the idea behind it, called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing, was pondered in the 1960s and 1970s. The theory was sitting around waiting for advances in electronics to finally realize OFDM’s inherent advantages in mitigating the signal mangling effects of multi-path echos.
When I first started writing about WiMax, around 2004, it was not considered a 3G technology at all and there were even doubts about its viability.
Since then WiMax’s prospects have improved. And in December 2010, at the ITU’s World Radiocommunication Seminar held in Geneva, this international standards organization— it’s the same on that came up with the 2G and 3G nomenclature—reconsidered WiMAX, and for that matter, LTE.
The ITU gnomes decided that both were really “IMT-Advanced” and could be thought of as 4G. They announced this verdict in a media release (see below), and then teased us all by saying that the detailed specs for IMT-Advanced will be released in 2012.
For now, WiMax is an IMT-Advanced, honorary 4G service whose specs are still being worked out.
I guess the Sprint marketers were ahead of the curve.
Related articles
- A beginner’s guide to telecom jargon (news.cnet.com)
- ITU World Radiocommunication Seminar 2010 (itu.int)
