What are the Standards of the G's

Each of the Generations has standards that must be met to officially use the G terminology. Those standards are set
by, you know, those people that set standards. The standards themselves are quite confusing but the advertisers sure
know how to manipulate them. I will try to simplify the terms a bit.
1G A term never widely used until 2G was available. This was the first generation of cell phone technology. Simple
phone calls were all it was able to do.
2G The second generation of cell phone transmission. A few more features were added to the menu such as simple
text messaging.
3G This generation set the standards for most of the wireless technology we have come to know and love. Web
browsing, email, video downloading, picture sharing and other Smartphone technology were introduced in the third
generation. 3G should be capable of handling around 2 Megabits per second.
4G The speed and standards of this technology of wireless needs to be at least 100 Megabits per second and up to
1 Gigabit per second to pass as 4G. It also needs to share the network resources to support more simultaneous
connections on the cell. As it develops, 4G could surpass the speed of the average wireless broadband home Internet
connection. Few devices are capable of the full throttle yet. Coverage of true 4G is limited to large metropolitan areas.
Outside of the covered areas, 4G phones regress to the 3G standards. We have a ways to go. For now, 4G is simply
a little faster than 3G.
4G LTE Long Term Evolution LTE sounds better. This buzzword is a version of 4G that is becoming the latest
advertised technology but still not true 4G as the standards are set. When you start hearing about LTE Advanced and
WIMAX Release 2, then we will be talking about true fourth generation wireless technologies because they are the
only two formats realized by the International Telecommunications Union as True 4G at this time.
WiMAX - Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access should be capable of around 40 megabits per second
with a range of 30 miles. It is one of the closest technologies to meet the standards of true 4G and as it develop
should surpass the 100MB/second which is the 4G standard. Mobile WiMAX allows the use of high speed data
transfers and is the main competition for the 4G LTE services provided by cellular carriers.
The major wireless networks are not actually lying to anyone about 4G, they simply stretch the truth a bit. A 4G phone
has to comply with the standards but finding the network resources to fulfill the true standard is difficult. You are
buying 4G capable devices but the network is not yet capable of delivering true 4G to the device. Your brain knows
that 4G is faster than 3G so you pay the price for the extra speed. Marketing 101.
Where does it go from here and why does this page exist? Not sure where this path will lead but the reason I wrote
this page was to try to understand the lingo a bit better. I think I cleared it up for myself so I thought I would pass it
along. Hope it helps!

2G (original GSM) was deliberately designed to be very power-efficient only for low-data
rate voice services. 3G was designed to be more spectrally efficient and to deliver higherrate data services, but at the expense of using more power.
Specifically:
- 2G uses 200kHz channel vs 5MHz for WCDMA (25x more). Power is roughly proportional
to bandwidth
- GSM used a very power-efficient constant envelope modulation scheme (GMSK). 3G uses
CDMA and higher order modulation (up to 16QAM or even 64QAM), which needs much
better linearity and hence the radio draws far more power. 2.5G (GPRS) and 2.75G (EDGE)

use QAM, which deliver more data and are more spectrally efficient (bps/Hz) so they
coverge with 3G somewhat.