4G

"4G" is the term used to refer to the International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced (IMT-Advanced) technology family of mobile wireless services, which has been defined and ratified by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). In an October 2010 meeting, The ITU's Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) Working Party 5D, which is responsible for defining the IMT-Advanced global 4G technologies, completed the assessment of six candidate technology submissions for the global 4G mobile wireless broadband technology. Of the proposals, two technologies, LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced, were each determined to have successfully met all of the criteria established by ITU-R for the first release of IMT-Advanced and were accorded the official designation of IMT-Advanced, qualifying them as 4G technologies. Final ratification of the full IMT-Advanced technology family took place at the ITU-R Study Group meeting on November 22 and 23, 2010, in Geneva, Switzerland.

As background for this IMT-Advanced project, ITU published a document, "Recommendation ITU-R M.1645: Framework and overall objectives of the future development of IMT-2000 and systems beyond IMT-2000."

These technologies will now move into the final stage of the IMT-Advanced process, which provides for the development in early 2012 of an ITU-R Recommendation specifying the in-depth technical standards for these radio technologies.