Yet, in the move to packetized information, and the internet as we know it, timing got left behind. In a fatal mix of both enthusiasm and arrogance, synchronous timing was seen as irrelevant. After all, the world was moving to asynchronous packetized information switched by routers. Why would anyone still need old-fashioned synchronous information? Ma Bell was dead. And what did she know anyway? Fast forward to today and the current standard Network Time Protocol offers timing only to within tens of milliseconds and only within 2 whole seconds in the Windows implementation!

One only need look at the OPERA physics experiment in Gran Sasso to see the critical importance of timing. A single loose optical connector in their timing network produced a 75 nanosecond error, which led to global press coverage of their announcement that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light. Timing will always be important, as all information is time-variant. There is no way to accurately know the what without knowing the when.

The evolution of timing standards.

With synchronous networking, you got the timing for free, as both the frequency and phase of the clock was buried in the carrier signal. Maintaining accurate timing and synchronization over a network that communicates with variable lengths packets spaced randomly apart is much more challenging.

So challenging, in fact, that network architects are taking a new look at the old approach: timing distribution networks. A throwback to analog phone calls and T1 internet service, the basic premise is that timing is once again embedded in the data being transported, with a clear protocol on how it may and may not be used. What might have been blasphemous to evangelical packet proponents at the start of the asynchronous packet age — making asynchronous networks more synchronous — is now seen as an urgent necessity.

In a modern timing distribution network, there is still an atomic “Master” master clock that serves as the single reference point for the entire network. The challenge is in maintaining that accuracy as the clock is distributed across a transport network. There is nothing that can be done about time of flight of the clock signal, as the speed of light is the speed of light (except in Gran Sasso).

However, if that transport time is accurately known, an offset may be applied, and relative clock accuracy is maintained. GPS and other local clock references do not go away. Rather, they all interconnect and are carefully synchronized, with all available information used to statistically narrow the uncertainty of the exact time at each node in the network. A loss of any source is easily compensated by group knowledge. If a more severe timing outage occurs, all that happens is the standard deviation of existing clock sources may spread a little. Math to the rescue.

Meet the standards.

There is a complex interplay of industry standards making all this happen. IEEE 1588v2 Precision Time Protocol (PTP) defines both how the timing is embedded in packets, as well as how each node should pass or modify the information. ITU-T G.8261/2/4 Synchronous Ethernet (SyncE) locks an output packet signal to the incoming signal in both frequency and phase. For SyncE to work, all links in the chain must support it and be in a locked state; PTP is much more forgiving, as it only requires all nodes to be transparent to the packets, a much lower bar. When both PTP and SyncE are combined, the ultimate in accuracy can be achieved.

While the packet timing standards and technology may be complex, implementation is surprisingly simple. Network devices that support timing are merely added at each node. Where existing customer premises equipment does not support timing, SyncProbes can be added either in series or in parallel to existing links. The timing protocols start working instantly in the background to improve all aspects of packet transport.

Why it matters

These recent advances in network timing have come none too soon. As mobile network operators make the transition to LTE Advanced, the required frequency and phase accuracy can only be achieved with timing distribution networks. LTE Advanced needs not only microsecond timing accuracy, but tight phase alignment as well. An often overlooked fact of LTE Advanced is the sheer number of antenna sites. Even though GPS clock sources continue to drop dramatically in price, it is simply not practical to place a GPS clock source at all sites, nor would they be accurate enough without the additional timing information provided by the timing distribution network .

However, the most important need for accurate timing is the one that goes unnoticed by even the most prognostic of soothsayers: Data centers. In the second of these articles on Sunday, we will look at the growing importance of timing in data centers.

Jim Theodoras is director of technical marketing at ADVA Optical Networking, working on Optical+Ethernet transport products.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters

The term Wi-Fi refers to interoperability compliance with specific IEEE 802.11 standards, and is a designation controlled by the Wi-Fi Alliance, the organization that certifies Wi-Fi gear. The Wi-Fi Alliance is not happy about the term “Super Wi-Fi” had this to say in a press release last year, “The technology touted as “Super Wi-Fi” does not interoperate with the billions of Wi-Fi devices in use today.” In addition, they state, “Wi-Fi is a registered trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance and the term ‘Super Wi-Fi’ is not an authorized extension of the brand.” So let’s just call it “white-space” network, which is the origin of this technology.

Since it’s not Wi-Fi, it needs new radios

Because super Wi-Fi isn’t a new band and has a new radio standard, existing Wi-Fi radios in phones, tablets, and laptops won’t work with these white-space networks. Any user wishing to connect over a future white-space network will need entirely new equipment, most likely a USB form-factor modem. Another possibility would be a wireless router that connects to the white-space network and provides Wi-Fi connections as a hot spot; however, that newly created Wi-Fi hotspot is then subject to all the congestion frailties we currently experience on Wi-Fi networks today.

Another important issue is the radio standard itself. There are two different standards being developed for white-space spectrum, IEEE 802.11af and IEEE 802.22. IEEE 802.22 was just recently completed but IEEE 802.11af is still in development. It’s not at all clear which of these standards will prevail in the market, or whether something entirely new will come along. Dueling standards generally serve to confuse and delay markets.

Now let’s try to understand the “super” part of this technology, since I don’t really see anything that “super” about it. First, it’s quite slow compared to existing Wi-Fi technologies, limited to a peak rate of 29 Mbps. In contrast the latest Wi-Fi standard, IEEE 802.11ac which is still under development but available in commercial product, can deliver throughput rates close to 1 Gbps (800 Mbps) in a base configuration, and over 6 Gbps in its most advanced configuration.

Who will build the networks?

Second, claims about its superiority are based on an assumption that as-yet-unidentified service providers will deploy networks to operate on this white space spectrum all over the country and offer wireless broadband service. Policymakers seem to hope that these new networks will somehow alleviate the mobile broadband capacity crunch that we are experiencing.

This notion, however, is flawed. First, it is extremely unlikely that any entity will invest billions of dollars in massive amounts of network infrastructure to use unlicensed spectrum to support commercial wireless broadband services. The carrier’s inability to guarantee service quality, predict and manage capacity, and eliminate or prevent interference render unlicensed spectrum an inferior solution for providers who compete based on quality of service and ability to support bandwidth-hungry apps and devices.

Add to this the possibility of different technologies using this band and it looks like an even less attractive basis for a significant capital expenditure which needs a return on the investment. For example, an IEEE article states that there is likely to be heavy degradation of 802.22 performance if it operates alongside an 802.11af network.

One thing we have learned over the least twenty years of building wireless data networks is that large volumes of users, whether its consumers, business users, or even M2M applications, subscribe to a wireless network technology only if they can obtain really broad coverage. Wireless network technologies with limited coverage have achieved only limited commercial success, including technologies such as Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD), Metricom Ricochet, and most recently Sprint/Clearwire’s WiMAX network.

The Google white spaces database in action.

White-space networks will be similarly limited in its coverage, but will further be complicated by being suited only for fixed operations. This is because the technologies currently envisioned to operate in the white space spectrum rely on the modem’s current location to query a database to learn what frequencies it is authorized to use.

Is LTE a better bet for this spectrum?

In contrast, wireless data technologies that have enjoyed wild success, such as EV-DO, HSPA, and LTE are technologies with extremely broad coverage, coverage achieved from tens of thousands of base stations covering almost all of the population. It may seem to be an apples to oranges comparison to compare a commercial LTE network with a white space network, yet it is exactly this comparison that needs to be made, because the spectrum being contemplated will end up being used for LTE networks or for white-space networks. There is no middle ground currently under discussion or development.

I believe one effective basis for such a comparison is to consider the aggregate capacity the two different networks might provide. The math for this is straightforward. Simply consider the number of possible sites, multiplied by the amount of spectrum, and multiply that by the spectral efficiency.

According to CTIA, there are some 285,000 cell sites. Assuming the spectrum was auctioned, cellular operators would likely deploy the spectrum across most of these sites, but a conservative estimate would be half these – 142,000 sites, each with 3 sectors. Taking 30 MHz of spectrum under consideration and average LTE spectral efficiency of 1.4 bps as per my studies and writing on this topic, that amounts to 17,640 gigabits/second (Gbps) of additional national mobile data capacity.

White-space networks could have comparable spectral efficiency and could also be deployed in 3 sector configurations. The only variable in question to determine the total capacity delivered by white-space networks using the same amount of spectrum is the number of sites (access points). Given my previous arguments of interference concerns, it’s inconceivable that anybody would build out white-space networks with density equivalent to cellular network.

White spaces are for local networks, not national ones

White spaces might be good for coffee shops?

It’s all well and good to create experimental networks and to foster innovation, but the 600 MHz band represents a precious resource at a time when providing sufficient capacity to foster the mobile broadband revolution is crucial, and a time when new sources of spectrum seem ever more challenging.

I believe applying that spectrum to technologies that will use it the most fully will provide the greatest societal and economic benefit. Right now, those technologies include LTE and LTE-Advanced. We should continue to foster innovation and experimentation with white space spectrum and Wi-Fi, but not at the expense of also expanding the base and capabilities of our best-in-class, commercial wireless broadband networks that depend on licensed, exclusive use spectrum for their core operations.

Peter Rysavy is President of Rysavy Research, a wireless network engineering firm.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• AT&T’s loss with T-Mo likely to be another bidder’s big gain
• New solutions for the evolving mobile network

The Tegra 4 handset is anticipated in the first half of 2013 according to Nvidia, and follows ZTE’s use of Nvidia’s Tegra 2 and 3 processors and Icera modem in earlier phones. It’s also the beginning of handsets designed to wow users with full HD playback and other features that require some serious processing power.

Nvidia isn’t the only company pushing more powerful application processors and flexible modems; ST-Ericsson announced a 3GHz monstrosity today as part of its NovaThor line of integrated chips. While ST-Ericsson is only showing off a prototype, the specs clearly show that it too has visions of faster phones that require a lot of processing power.

The NovaThor also supports a huge variety of mobile radio technologies that make it useful in many geographic areas. For those who want to get technical, the NovaThor L8580 supports downlink speeds up to 150Mbps as well as LTE-FDD, LTE-TDD, HSPA+, GSM and TD-SCDMA. It has up to 17 bands in the same device and a single radio for carrier aggregation, which is what enables it to tune into frequencies in many markets. Like Broadcom’s latest modem, ST-Ericsson and Nvidia are pushing the bar when it comes to building radios that can travel far and wide even if a country uses different frequencies for their LTE deployments.

In many ways the future of phones is the same has it had been, more performance in more places. Technology is awesome.

The story was corrected on Feb. 21 to reflect the fact that ZTE is launching two phones one with the Tegra 4 and one later, using the i500 modem.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016

The chip with the endearing name of BCM21892 is sampling now to hardware partners and expected to be in production by next year. So don’t look for any smartphones or tablets this year that use it. That’s OK because LTE-Advanced networks are still a future event as well. But once they’re here, good ol’ BCM21892 can take advantage of them with downloads up to 150 Mbps with uploads topping out at 50 Mbps.

Technically the radio interface on Broadcom’s new chip still falls in the plain old LTE category. Only when Broadcom boosts speeds to 300 Mbps over 20 MHz of spectrum will it really be LTE-Advanced as defined by the standards bodies. That said, these chips will support carrier aggregation, which is an LTE-Advanced technique.

Broadcom is also positioning the small chip as a solution for all mobile broadband needs with support for all of the 3GPP standards including LTE FDD and TDD, LTE-Advanced with carrier aggregation, HSPA+, TD-SCDMA and EDGE/GSM.

The chip is also optimized for Voice over LTE (VoLTE). Broadcom says that these voice calls use 40 percent less battery than calls over traditional cellular networks. That’s important because tests of prior VoLTE implementations have shown the calls to use more battery than traditional calls.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• New solutions for the evolving mobile network
• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• How to manage the signaling storm in 2013

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

For those who won’t be in the Big Easy drinking from the wireless networking firehouse, here’s what NSN is so excited about and why it matters. The test showed off gigabit speeds on a TD-LTE Advanced network. Gigabit wireless demos are not new. Huawei has shown them off, as has NSN for the more traditional style of LTE-Advanced network that carriers like AT&T and Verizon will likely deploy. Today’s test was of TD-LTE, which Clearwire and other former WiMAX operators are planning to deploy.

Other than being of the TD-variant, the test also used the next generation of LTE standard called LTE Advanced. We don’t expect to see LTE-Advanced hit the market in a real way until much later this decade, although carriers are using some of the features associated with the standard to aggregate their spectrum. And speaking of spectrum, to achieve the blazing speeds of this test would require a lot more spectrum, much more power and uncrowded airwaves, so don’t wait up for those gigabit speeds. Anyhow, they’d totally bust through your data cap.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• Sprint’s tightrope walk: finding a balance for its network modernization plan

The good news is that handset makers and network vendors are doing plenty to boost the power efficiency of LTE devices, but the bad news is that as 4G technologies evolve, making our phone and tablet connections even faster, their radios will continue to voraciously eat up batteries. The question is can the former trend keep up with the latter.

Why your next LTE phone will be better

The first generation of LTE devices are unquestionable the most sophisticated smartphones and tablets we’ve seen to date in terms of processing power, screen-resolution and OS software. But the approach most vendors were forced to take to the radio was hardly delicate. In most cases an LTE chip was shoehorned into the device, which is hardly a formula for long battery life.

There’s a lot of work that silicon vendors are doing to squeeze better power performance out of those phones. Components that are today separated in the bowels of the phone such as the applications processor and baseband will be combined, allowing them to share power resources. The world’s largest radio chip vendor Qualcomm has released its first integrated Snapdragon processor and LTE radio modem, and according to Qualcomm product management VP Raj Talluri, we’ll see many devices supporting that next-gen chip at Mobile World Congress next week.

Texas Instruments is developing radio chips that require the device to lean less and less on a smartphone’s powerful applications processor to perform basic tasks, such as initiate NFC payments or perform quick GPS-location checks. The longer the apps processor remains dormant the less drain the phone will have on the battery.

Optimizing the network will also be a big source of power savings. As operators move their voice services onto LTE and build out both the coverage and density of their networks, they can offer LTE-only phones (Verizon is targeting its first such device for 2013). The fewer active radios there are sucking at the battery, the longer our phones will sustain charges.

As operators build denser networks, shrinking the size of LTE cells, phones won’t have to boost their transmit power as much to link to the tower. And as coverage improves, phones will stay within LTE’s warm embrace for longer intervals, eliminating the need to constantly negotiate between an operator’s multiple networks.

The tug-of-war in the handset

The big question is whether all of those tweaks and technologies will be enough. Power drain will be an ongoing problem for handset designers and their efforts are complicated by the fact that radios are becoming fundamentally less power efficient even as they become more bandwidth efficient. ABI Research analyst Jim Mielke summed up this way: “The bottom line is the higher the data rate and higher spectral efficiency, the higher the computing requirements — and thus power drain.”

That means future technologies like LTE-Advanced, which promises speeds as high 1 Gbps, will be ravenously hungry for power. Older generation technologies won’t be immune either. As T-Mobile moves to 84 Mbps HSPA+, it will add dual antennas to its devices, which suck down power just like their LTE brethren.

Mielke said some of that power drain is offset by the simple efficiency of its ultra-fast LTE modem  — the faster a device can download a video or file, the sooner it can shut down the data session and de-activate the radio. Theoretically faster download speeds and the LTE radio’s inherent power inefficiency should cancel each other out, but that’s assuming that consumers use LTE phones the same way they use 3G ones. It’s no coincidence that the newest smartphones don’t just have 4G radios, but also larger higher-definition screens and multi-core processors. LTE’s speeds allow the mobile public to do so much more with their handsets, and the tendency is take advantage of that raw power to stream more video, surf more Web pages and download more files – that is until data caps kick in.

Vendors like Motorola are combating the problem by sacrificing design for fatter batteries, as it did with the new Razr Maxx. The short term solution is for device makers to devote more device cost and space to the phone’s lithium-ion footprint. But ultimately battery technology is going to have to improve if the handset industry is going to keep up with advancements in radio technology.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The big theme of MWC: How to live in a connected world
• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• How to manage the signaling storm in 2013

As Dave Burstein of Fast Net News first highlighted in late January, AT&T’s senior management told investors on two separate occasions last month that “The base increase of data consumption right now is growing 40 percent a year,” and “LTE does give us a 30 percent to 40 percent lift in network efficiency, but at current growth rates, that equates to only about a year’s increase in traffic”. Remarkably that 40 percent figure is not only far less than the growth rates projected by Cisco and assumed in the FCC’s October 2010 working paper (which argued that 300MHz of additional spectrum was needed by 2014), but it also contrasts dramatically with the figures AT&T itself presented when it announced the planned takeover of T-Mobile in March last year.

In that March 2011 presentation AT&T projected that data volumes would grow by 8 to 10 times between the end of 2010 and the end of 2015, based on an expectation that volumes would roughly double in 2011 and then increase by a further 65 percent in 2012. However, if we instead project out the current 40 percent increase in data consumption that AT&T is seeing then volumes would only increase by 5-6 times by 2015. Ironically, if that rate of growth was applied to the FCC’s October 2010 model, all of this data traffic would easily be accommodated for the rest of this decade by existing spectrum allocations under the FCC’s own assumptions of new cell site deployments and spectrum efficiency gains from new technologies.

Why might AT&T’s data volumes have fallen so far short of the growth expected less than a year ago? Two obvious explanations stand out: it seems that offload to Wi-Fi is becoming far more successful than many expected, and AT&T is now cracking down on the top 5 percent of users of its unlimited iPhone data plans.

With those “power users” consuming on average 12 times more data than other customers, and doing bizarre things like turning off Wi-Fi to save battery life while watching Netflix movies, it’s pretty easy to see how even a modest effort should reduce AT&T’s network loading significantly.

Of course, going forward AT&T would still find it much easier to increase the capacity of its LTE network by using additional spectrum rather than going through the messy process of refarming PCS or 800MHz spectrum from GSM to LTE. Now that AT&T has handed over much of its AWS holdings to T-Mobile as part of the break fee for that deal, AT&T would need look elsewhere for this spectrum.

So it’s hardly surprising that AT&T has been vocally proclaiming its opposition to the FCC placing any restrictions on participation in future auctions or on other potential acquisitions. However, with plenty of near term headroom on its new LTE network, the primary focus is likely to be on AT&T’s spectrum needs in 2015 and beyond. A time frame that will include its potential build out of an LTE-Advanced network.

Ultimately, as many (including myself) have been speculating, it therefore probably does make most sense for AT&T to end up in bed with DISH Network and use its relatively clean 2x20MHz of satellite spectrum for LTE Advanced. This assumes the FCC allows this spectrum to be repurposed for terrestrial services in the near future.

It could be argued that if demand growth is slower than previously expected, then AT&T might hold off on a decision for another year or more to see what happens with other spectrum bands (such as broadcast TV and AWS-3). On the other hand, if DISH’s alternative plan could potentially bring together other players like MetroPCS and even perhaps DirecTV to create a rival 4G network, AT&T may believe that now is the time to cement its dominant position alongside Verizon in the wireless industry. Thus ensuring that no-one else will ever be able to come close to the spectrum holdings and network coverage of these two players.

Tim Farrar is President of Telecom, Media and Finance Associates, a consulting and research firm in Menlo Park, CA, which specializes in technical and financial analysis across the satellite and telecom sectors.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Jeff Kubina.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• Confused about the wireless markets? Here’s a breakdown
• Mobile Q4: The scramble for spectrum continues

Theoretical speeds are just that, theoretical. Just as T-Mobile’s 21 Mbps and 42 Mbps HSPA+ systems could never actually deliver those peak speeds in real world environments, eAccess customers won’t be downloading the human genome onto their smartphones. TeleGeography reported that subscribers to the carrier’s eMobile service can expect more realistic speeds of 75 Mbps with a 25 Mbps uplink tossed in for good measure. Considering that’s faster than most residential broadband connections, I doubt customers will complain.

In order to achieve that performance, eAccess had to max out the technical capabilities of today’s LTE standard (for the less acronym averse, that’s 3GPP Release 8), a luxury that many global operators don’t share. eAccess is building its network over 40 MHz of spectrum, while Verizon’s and AT&T’s rollouts use 20 MHz or less.

EAccess also has to cram four LTE antennas into its devices, while we only use two antennas stateside. It’s highly unlikely eAccess will be able to incorporate this technology into smartphones. Double antennas mean double the power consumption, but they also create a problem for spatial design. Those antennas will need room to stretch, otherwise the network won’t find them. That probably means the full capabilities of the network will only be available to larger devices such as laptops or tablets. Or if eAccess sticks to its wireline roots, it may use it as residential broadband service. A smartphone with a 75 Mbps connections is overkill anyway.

When can we expect networks like this in the U.S.? Well, the operators are working on incorporating technologies from the next wireless standard, LTE-Advanced, into their current networks. LTE-Advanced promises speeds as high as 1 Gbps for stationary devices, but operators don’t have the spectrum to implement the full capabilities of the standard at once. We’ll likely see more conservative LTE-Advanced deployments that may well give eAccess’ super-LTE network a challenge in a dead heat.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010-2015
• How to manage the signaling storm in 2013

LTE-Advanced will ultimately have a huge impact on the mobile networks and the devices that use them, but don’t expect 1 Gbps speeds to suddenly pop on your phones next year. LTE-Advanced won’t come out as a single new network like plain-old LTE did, but rather, in waves. It’s more like a menu of technologies: Operators will select whatever technology or technique that looks tastiest at the time, implement it in their current LTE networks, and when they get hungry for more speed, capacity or efficiency, they will return to their vendors for another meal. My colleague Stacey has already detailed all the different menu selections in a previous post, so I won’t go into all of them here. But I’ll go over some of the big-ticket items:

• Network Crazy Glue. The LTE-Advanced AT&T, Sprint and Clearwire are talking about launching next year is really a single component of the standard, called carrier aggregation. Simply put, it allows operators to bond their current downlink and uplink channels — known collectively as carriers – on top of one another to create stupendously fast connection speeds, but ….
• Don’t count on a Gigabit anytime soon. While the standards call for networks that will eventually support 1 Gbps speeds to stationary devices, that’s more of theoretical aspiration than a realistic goal. For Verizon to hit those speeds, it would need to devote 10 times the amount of capacity it currently uses for LTE to LTE-Advanced — that’s 200 MHz, and it only has 118 MHz across all of its networks.
•  Will your phone have rabbit ears?  LTE-Advanced will boost the number of antennas supported in a device from two to eight and will use a technique called MIMO to send a single transmission over multiple paths, ultimately giving your device a big boost in speed. But MIMO antennas can’t be stacked on top of one another like stogies in a cigar box; they need their space to work. So, unless you want to carry a device the size of a Volkswagen in your pocket, you won’t be getting an eight-antenna device — and their crazy fast speeds — any time soon.
• Speaking of Volkswagens. Cars may wind up being the ideal candidates to reap the full benefits of MIMO and LTE-Advanced. Unlike our phones, cars have alternators, which can supply the enormous power demands eight antennas would require. Each antenna draws the power equivalent of single cellphone connection, which is why today’s LTE devices go dead so quickly. Battery efficiency will have to improve immensely before handset makers can think about eight, or even four, MIMO antennas to any mobile device.
• Is LTE-Advanced really 5G? Sure, if you want it to be. 3G, 4G and 5G have all become meaningless marketing terms (Broadcom is already applying 5G to Wi-Fi). If you want to get technical though, LTE-Advanced, at least its initial implementation, isn’t even considered 4G by the ITU’s definitions. A 4G network must be theoretically capable of supporting a downlink of 1 Gbps in a fixed environment, which will be impossible for most of the world’s operators to achieve. So the technical definitions are just as useless as the marketing ones for distinguishing between the generations of network technology — unless we want to remain in a world of perpetual 3G.

Like I said, we’ll start seeing the beginning of all of this LTE-Advanced craziness next year when AT&T, and possibly Sprint, start duct-taping their carriers together. I wouldn’t, however, expect the impact on the customer to be that big. But don’t lose hope. LTE-Advanced may launch with a murmur, but its impact on your smartphone, your tablet and your vehicle — and hopefully your monthly wireless bill — will grow as operators dive more fully into the standard.

If you want  more details about the possibilities and limitations of LTE-Advanced, check out my GigaOM Pro analysis (subscription required) on the subject.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• LTE-Advanced: what it is and isn’t
• LTE changes everything; LTE changes nothing
• Confused about the wireless markets? Here’s a breakdown