T-Mobile claims the biggest ” 4G” network within the country. Verizon’s launching its ” 4G” LTE network later this year. And Sprint loves talking about ” 4G” WiMax. Thing is, none of these networks are actually 4G. Not by a protracted shot.

Who decides what’s 4G?

There’s like a bajillion massive, international organizations that jockey for position to dictate various what technology standards seem like. Relating to 3G/4G, there are a couple of major groups at play:

• The International Telecommunication Union is a United Nations agency that, among other things, sets international standards for telecommunications. This group ultimately decides if a wireless technology is 3G or 4G or, like, 9000G. To be considered 4G, a network technology has to fulfill a hard and fast of specs often known as IMT-Advanced .

• 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) is a collection of telecom standards bodies that originally got together to develop the technical specs for a 3G network. This group developed the common-or-garden for UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications), which GSM carriers use for 3G data transmission. They’re also the cats behind LTE, the following-gen wireless network that GSM carriers like AT&T will migrate to. (I highly recommend reading our CDMA vs. GSM primer now whenever you haven’t, BTW.)

• Whenever you’ve ever bought a router, you’re probably aware of the number 802.11. What that weird string of digits refers to is IEEE 802.11 , the set of standards for wireless local area networking, and the working group that defines them. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers does a number of things, and one of them is about technical standards. What’s relevant here’s that a subset of these governing geeks, the IEEE 802.16 working group, standardizes Wireless Metropolitan Area networks-what you know better as WiMax.

None of these ” 4G” networks is admittedly 4G

Right now, every major carrier inside the US is touting a ” 4G” network that’s either available or being rolled out. Sprint is pushing WiMax. AT&T and Verizon are pushing LTE (Long-Term Evolution). T-Mobile is pushing HSPA+ (High Speed Packet Access Evolved). They’re all faster than the ” 3G” speeds than we’re used to, with WiMax and HSPA+ delivering consistent, real-world speeds of anywhere from 3Mbps-12Mbps today. But a rep for the ITU told me flatly, ” The truth is that there aren’t any IMT-Advanced-or 4G-systems available or deployed at this stage.” Calling their newer, faster networks ” 4G” is ” completely marketing” by the carriers, says Gartner analyst Phil Hartman.

The ITU has actually just decided which technologies are officially designated as IMT-Advanced-” true 4G technologies” in its eyes-after watching six candidates. The winners: LTE-Advanced ( LTE Release 10 )and WirelessMAN-Advanced (aka 802.16m aka WiMax Release 2 ). In other words, the following versions of today’s LTE and WiMax. Despite sharing the names, and being developed by an identical groups as their predecessors, the for-serious 4G networks can be ” pretty different” at a technical level, says Hartman.

If you watched top speeds of 300Mbps for LTE and 72Mbps for WiMax are impressive, true 4G makes them look downright pokey. Today’s 4G is ” not anywhere near what the 4G experience might be in 10-15 years,” says Hartman. You’re talking about speeds of ” up to a gigabit a second” in a wireless LAN, and 100Mbps for fully mobile applications. In other words, true 4G is a tremendous leap, not a dainty skip forward. There’s also little things, like full capability for voice in LTE-Advanced, which there’s no standard for inside the current LTE spec.

The goal of true 4G is to create a superfast, incredibly interoperable, basically ubiquitous global networks. What we’ve got now and within the very near future is pretty good, and certainly better than what we’ve had. But they’re no 4G.

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This post is tagged: generation partnership project, institute of electrical and electronics engineers, international telecommunication union, local area networking, metropolitan area networks, united nations agency, universal mobile telecommunications