What is 4G ??!

Wherever you look in Jordan’s WiMAX advertisements you see them claiming to offer 4G, just to show that they are on the cutting edge of technology ..... in fact there is no 4G standard until now… and that the 4G is just a phrase invented by marketers and advertisers who cannot explain the difference between UMTS, WiMAX and LTE.

In short the standard of 3G/UMTS is called IMT-2000. It is a standard that was created under the auspices of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) years ago, a standard that was created to enable telephones, infrastructure and services to function across networks from different manufacturers, in the same way as we know from a number of other areas in the telecom industry.

if we look on the WiMAX and LTE standards they are part of the IMT-2000 standard therefore thety are part of what we daily call 3G or UMTS. In practice, LTE is a natural evolution of UMTS and part of the same standard that is the foundation of the 3G networks that are in operation today all over the world. Simply put one could say that LTE is a 3G technology in the same way as UMTS, UMTS-HSDPA, UMTS-HSUPA etc.

when the IMT-2000 standard was created it became the foundation of 3G and the start of an evolution that is based on a number of technologies moving from UMTS to LTE - an evolution that has given millions of people access to mobile broadband and that will result in over one billion people using mobile networks as their primary Internet access technology in just a few years.

To call WiMAX or LTE 4G is simply misleading and is contributing in moving focus away from the possibilities created by mobile broadband and over to a technological race with nothing else than the number of G’s deciding whether something is good or bad.