What is fourth generation (4G) mobile?
4G will build upon the above W-CDMA 3G standard. 4G is seen as favourable to both 3G and Wi-Fi because 3G has not delivered as promised and suffers technical glitches whilst Wi-Fi is limited to a distance of 50 meters away from a hotspot. 4G in principle will allow high-quality smooth video transmission. It will enable fast downloading of full-length songs or music pieces in real time.
The business of 4Gmobile is predicted to be huge. By 2008, this 4Gmobile market will be over $400B. From 2005 to 2010, this 4Gmobile technology will dominate the wireless communications, and its converged system will replace most conventional wireless infrastructure.
At the moment Korea is pushing full steam ahead with 4G as they feel 3G wireless has not delivered to expectations.
Networks and equipment manufacturers such as DoCoMo planned to introduce 4G services around 2010. Recently DoCoMo announced plans to introduce 4G services from 2006, i.e. four years earlier than previously planned. They are now thinking about 4 G.
What will the data rates be for 4G?
At present the download speed for mobile Internet connections range from 9.6 kbit/s for 2G cellular, up to 200 kbit/s (nominally 384 kbps) for the new Vodafone 3G service (mentioned above). However, in actual use the data rates are usually slower, especially in crowded areas, or when the network is "congested".
4G mobile data transmission rates are planned to be up to 20 megabits per second That’s about 10-20 times faster than standard ASDL services.
In terms of connection seeds, 4G will be about 200 times faster than present 2G mobile data rates, and about 10 times faster than 3G broadband mobile. 3G data rates are currently 2Mbit/sec, which is very fast compared to 2G's 9.6Kbit/sec.