What does 4g lte mean

A quick guide to processor lingo. Android Lollipop: Our favorite features. Top 10 battery tips for your smartphone or tablet. The future is 5G. Stay connected with Verizon. This content is provided for information purposes only. All information included herein is subject to change without notice.

Verizon is not responsible for any direct or indirect damages, arising from or related to use or reliance of the above content. What does it all mean to your service and download speeds?

Mobile data technology started out as 2G and then evolved over time to 4G. The standards for the fourth generation, or 4G, came into effect in The speed and connection standards of a 4G network for phones and tablets had, in theory, to meet a peak of megabits per second Mbps and, for stable zones like mobile hotspots, needed to function at a minimum of 1GB per second.

Such speeds were still unrealized when the standards were announced, and networks were gradually upgraded over subsequent years to catch up — to the point where many former 3G networks can now meet 4G standards.

It was a process that was designed to take the promise of 4G speeds and actually make them a reality. For a long time, there was a wide gap between the potential and the actual results; service was considered 4G if it at least offered substantial improvements over the previous 3G service standards.

Despite that discrepancy, any progress toward 4G technology was immediately noticeable as an improvement over 3G. LTE can handle much more data transfer, and it helps streamline your service. The basic improvements that LTE offers could be summed up as a reduction in data transfer latency, or delay. It can be usefully likened to removing speed bumps in a road, allowing traffic to move faster. As LTE progressed, 4G networks came very gradually nearer to closing the gap between theoretical limits and practical ones.

This in turn came to have more and more noticeable benefits, such as the steady spread of high-performance mobile video 3G networks could play video but typically at much lower resolutions and with periodic data buffering.

These two technologies became popular at around a similar time, and both were pitched as the next stage of mobile communications after the third generation, which most people know as 3G. Although the terms LTE and 4G are often used interchangeably, they're not actually the same thing. The way they relate to each other, 3G , and 5G , is complex, but it's important to understand these differences. The fourth generation of mobile telecommunications technology is known simply as 4G, which has followed on unsurprisingly from the third-generation 3G , which came after the second generation 2G.

Even though the ITU-R set the standard for what we consider to be 4G, it's not actually a regulatory body, so it doesn't have any control over what's marketed as 4G. Short for "Long Term Evolution", it's slower than "true" 4G, but significantly faster than 3G, which originally had data rates measured in kilobits per second, rather than megabits per second. While this leaves the fastest 3G download speeds in the dust Build a data strategy for the next wave of cloud innovation.

In short, it's down to marketing. Other naming conventions like 3. With nobody at a national or international level to say LTE can't be called 4G, since ITU-R has no enforcement powere and in the UK only advertised speeds are regulated, mobile operators decided simply to declare their new faster mobile services to be fourth generation. MIMO stands for multiple-input and multiple-output and is a method for increasing the bandwidth of a radio connection, which any form of mobile telecommunications technology is, including 4G and LTE.