Has the iPhone 4S really turned into a 4G device? – The real story unveiled – Part 3

According to the ITU’s initial IMT-Advanced specification, for a technology to be considered “4G” it must deliver downlink speeds of 1Gbps when stationary and 100Mbps when mobile. So far no commercialized standard — whether it’s WiMax, LTE or HSPA+ — has even come close to reaching these aggressive specifications.

However, with time, ITU showed flexibility to technology and now any advancement of HSPA with theoretically more speed can be called 4G on the discretion of carrier.

T-Mobile had been late to the 3G market. And at the time, the company had no plan to eventually upgrade to LTE technology. Instead, it began aggressively upgrading its to more advanced HSPA+. In markets where it deployed 21 Mbps HSPA+, download speeds are actually faster than what can be achieved with Sprint’s 4G WiMax service. T-Mobile has even upgraded further, and now some portions of its network support 42 Mbps HSPA+.

When T-Mobile first started marketing HSPA+ as 4G, AT&T, which was also upgrading to HSPA+, criticized the company and said the carrier’s loose terminology would confuse customers. But within the year, AT&T, which also began upgrading its traditional 3G HSPA network to faster versions of HSPA+, also started calling its service 4G.

Today’s WiMax standard has the potential to achieve theoretical downloads of 40 Mbps. And LTE can achieve speeds of 100 Mbps. There are updates to each of these standards coming. And WiMax 2 and LTE-Advanced are expected to get these technologies closer to the ITU’s 4G spec. HSPA+, which doesn’t use OFDMA, is also advancing and may one day achieve the ITU’s 4G limits.

The interesting thing in this regard is that AT&T has now laid out 4G LTE network and the upcoming iPhone 4S is expected to be LTE-based. Then AT&T is going to have a hard time differentiating the two devices in the same 4G networks.

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Posted by Usman Khalid on Apr 6 2012. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.