The Fourth Generation mobile network also referred to as 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) has become more widespread LTE was first proposed in 2004 by Japan’s telecom NTT Docomo, with studies on the standard officially commenced in 2005. But what is the difference between all this 4G jargon?
ALSO READ: Things you need to know about connecting to 4G Internet
As we still wait for telecom companies to roll out 5G, we are currently stuck with two options in order to enjoy fast Internet speeds. Nevertheless, we do wonder whether there are any readers out there who even tinker with their connectivity settings to switch from 3G to 4G and vice versa on their phones.
4G comes in many flavors whose symbols we can see displayed on our smartphones telecom companies. Sometimes these symbols are mainly used for marketing purposes only.
LTE was designed to be able to deliver performance superior to that of existing networks based on 3G technology. The performance targets in 3GPP are defined as comparable to the fastest 3G speeds called (HSPA) in Release 6. The peak user throughput should be a minimum of 100 Mbps in the downlink and 50 Mbps in the uplink, which is ten times more than HSPA Release 6.
The main performance targets are:
- spectral efficiency two to four times more than with HSPA Release 6;
- peak rates surpass 100 Mbps in the downlink and 50 Mbps in the uplink;
- allows a round trip time of
- packet switched enhanced;
- high level of mobility and security;
- enhanced terminal power efficiency;
- frequency versatility with allocations from below 1.5MHz up to 20 MHz.
Additionally, 4G LTE which is often referred to as 3.9G is a kind of system that replaced the predecessor 3G by offering more great and significant rates while the LTE advanced is an improvement of 4G LTE that renders faster connections than both the 3G and 4G. The difference between these 4G technologies comes down to the maximum theoretical speeds, latency, and capacity.
LTE+ and LTE Advance are exactly the same – The terms are used interchangeably because some carriers in some countries decided to use one or the other for no particular reason. In the advanced 10th version of networks LTE advanced is capable of reaching a decent speed of 1 GB/s while its counterpart 4G LTE reaches a peak speed of 100Mb/s. Therefore the LTE advanced offers a faster and more reliable connection than 4G LTE and is thus faster.
Data rate: Many services with lower data rates such as voice services are important and still occupy a large part of a mobile network’s overall capacity, but it is the higher data rate services that drive the design of the radio interface. The ever increasing demand for higher data rates for web browsing, streaming, and file transfer forces the peak data rates for mobile systems from kbit/s for 2G, to Mbit/s for 3G and getting close to Gbit/s for 4G.
Delay: Interactive services such as real-time gaming, but also web browsing, and interactive file transfer, have requirements for very low delay, making it a primary design target. There are, however, many applications such as e-mail and television where the delay requirements are not as strict. The delay for a packet sent from a server to a client and back is called latency.
Capacity: From the mobile system operator’s point of view, it is not only the peak data rates provided to the end-user that are of importance but also the total data rate that can be provided on average from each deployed base station site and per hertz of licensed spectrum. This measure of capacity is called spectral efficiency. In the case of capacity shortage in a mobile system, the Quality-of-Service (QoS) for the individual end-users may be degraded.
What is clear is that the maximum quoted speeds above refer to only one user using all 4G network resources on a particular cell tower
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