Next Gen

I love articles which can streamline the growth of technology rather than throwing terminologies which leave you feeling really dense.

So, after a whole lot of reading on LTE, here goes all that I gathered:

There is the CDMA2000 standard which uses the frequency range of 800 Mhz and 1900 Mhz. Loads of implementations but since we always US focused, it has been implemented by Sprint and Verizon. As improvements for data download speeds, the next level of technology will be EVDO Revision C (Revision A already had download speeds of 3 Mbps) which will look at download speeds of.
And then we have AT&T and T- Mobile which have implemented W-CDMA. Historically, they have faced rather low data download speeds of 384 kbps. And hence the planned migration to HSDPA and finally LTE - which is where I started from. HSDPA download speeds - 3.6 Mbps. Frequency range ~ 2100 Mhz . Since it is higher than the CDMA2000 operators, there are higher costs due to lower coverage area and hence the requirement for a larger number of base stations.

But then what is LTE - well, you can call it 4G. It is essentially upgrades to HSDPA using a different air interface, OFDMA, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access. Download speeds - 100 Mbps; Uplink - 50 Mbps.

Commerical deployments for LTE and Revision C - 2010.

Suprisingly enough, this article talked about WiMAX as a 4G technology too with the difference that it has not evolved from other standards and hence may not have the economies of scale required for a wide spread deployment.