How Many Gs Have You Got?

The letter G has many meanings.  It’s the seventh letter in the English alphabet.  In American slang parlance, it means one thousand dollars. But for techies, it means generation as in wireless wide area network (WWAN) technology.  The more Gs there are, the better in that context. 4G is the current upper limit.

Let’s take a quick trip through the WWAN generations.

• 0G was mobile telephone without networks. Callers connected through operator assistance. 
• 1G was connection to networks through stations called cells.
• 2G saw the entrance of the average consumer where phones included email, cameras and more as well as placing and receiving phone calls. 
• 3G rolled in the bells and whistles offering Internet connections and simultaneous voice, data, music, and telephone plus apps! Commerce became easier as phones were able to be used for credit transitions for the first time.
• 4G provides high speed connectivity for mobile devices to support multimedia, such as real time audio, HDTV video, mobile TV and more. For the detail-oriented, the transfer rate is 100 megabit per second (mbps) to 1 gigabit per second (gbps). 1gbps is equivalent to 1,000 mbps.

Where can you find 4G?

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has finalized the specifications and designated LTE, LTE-Advanced, WiMAX 2 and HSPA Plus. The usual cast of mobile carriers offers their version on these.

• AT&T LTE and HSPA Plus
• Sprint WiMAX
• T-Mobile HSPA Plus
• Verizon LTE

If you buy 4G will you actually get 100 mbps to 1 gbps transfer rates?

Volume of activity on the network at any given time affects the speed of downloads and uploads. The more users and the more bandwidth-intensive their activities are, the slower the speeds. If you are fortunate and randomly pick a time when there are fewer active users requesting and sending data, it will be faster.

What has pushed us to 4G?

The rise of numbers of SmartPhones devices, such as the iPhone, has made it easier to request more and more data through the networks.  The carriers are struggling on two fronts.  First is to achieve acceptable connections between the cell towers and the Internet backbone to respond quickly enough for consumer expectations. Second is to provide enough radio frequency spectrum to connect the cell towers to the phones.   Those are topics for a more intense discussion.  Let’s just say we have increasingly ready access to devices and are requesting/consuming increasingly large amounts of data.

Bottom line: The more Gs you have access to at any given time, the faster you’ll be happily watching last night’s episode of “30 Rock.”