After assessing six candidate submissions for the official title of "4G," the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has harmonized them into two technologies--LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced, otherwise known as WiMAX's 802.16m technology.
That means today's flavors of WiMAX and LTE don't qualify, but that likely won't stop the marketers from designating them as 4G.
At its recent meeting in Chongqing, China, ITU-R Working Party 5D, which is charged with defining the IMT-Advanced global 4G technologies, decided on these technologies for the first release of IMT-Advanced. In the ITU-R Report, which will be published shortly. The working group declared that LTE-Advanced, the next-generation of LTE, and WirelessMAN-Advanced technologies have successfully met all of the criteria established by the ITU for the first release of 4G, otherwise known as IMT-Advanced. The report is expected to be approved by the ITU member states at the ITU-R Study Group 5 meeting in Geneva late next month.
These technologies will now move into the final stage of the IMT-Advanced process, which provides for the development in early 2012 of an ITU-R Recommendation specifying the in-depth technical standards for these radio technologies.
For more:
- see this ITU release
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