.Dust

A new myth is going to rise, the Gen­er­a­tion 4. In the begin­ning was 2G, then 3G, adopted for mobile phone con­nec­tion as an indi­ca­tor, for pro­fane peo­ple, that some­thing is going on. Only a few take care of tech­ni­cal details such as speed, cov­er­age, power, that remained cov­ered under the brand.
Now it’s time for another change, 3.5G is already deployed, but the name is not so cool (three­dot­fivegee), and some­one gives the tracks for 4G. Basi­cally these rules where about down­load and upload speed, spec­trum range, back­ward com­pat­i­bil­ity, essen­tially it is a wire­less broad­band Inter­net sys­tem with voice and other ser­vices built on top.
In this foggy sce­nario 3GPP LTE is born, “Long Term Evo­lu­tion is the name given to a project within the Third Gen­er­a­tion Part­ner­ship Pro­gramme to improve the UMTS mobile phone stan­dard to cope with future require­ments” as in Wikipedia pages. And con­tin­ues “Goals include improv­ing effi­ciency, low­er­ing costs, improv­ing ser­vices, mak­ing use of new spec­trum oppor­tu­ni­ties, and bet­ter inte­gra­tion with other open stan­dards. The LTE project is not a stan­dard, but it will result in the new evolved release 8 of the UMTS stan­dard, includ­ing mostly or wholly exten­sions and mod­i­fi­ca­tions of the UMTS sys­tem. (…) the project has set itself some spe­cific goals, much of which is ori­ented around upgrad­ing UMTS to a so-​called fourth gen­er­a­tion mobile com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­ogy”.
In a word, it is a bat­tle­field, the giants started to place their big feet on the ground, one of them already declared that 4G is WiMax, the oppo­site parts rise the LTE flags (or NGNM), it seems that the win­ner could be the one that will shout louder than the oth­ers. Man at work, manoeu­vres, from a the­o­ret­i­cal point of view 4G is an UMTS improve­ment, so HS(D/U)PA already goes in that way: you squeeze your net­work and obtain bet­ter per­for­mances (think at the cop­per wire, from V21/​22 to ADSL, good job). But do we really need it, or the chal­lenge could be pro­vide a med­dle of tech­nolo­gies from PAN to WAN, all merged together in a stan­dard archi­tec­ture? And is really Wi-​Max the 3G evo­lu­tion, the 4G? It’s a bat­tle­field, and very often the win­ner is the strongest, not the smartest.

Why do I blog this?
The evo­lu­tion from 2G to 3G sur­prised us, it hap­pened overnight, it is still ongo­ing, it gives us ben­e­fits that we’re still dis­cov­er­ing. 4G needs to be a ®evo­lu­tion, not a brand but some­thing that trans­form con­nec­tiv­ity in per­va­siv­ity.
You bet­ter Watch Out.

Related posts:

1. The def­i­n­i­tion of Smartphone
2. What I want from a Music Phone