Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a 4G wireless broadband technology developed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), an industry trade group. 3GPP named the technology "Long Term Evolution" as it represents the next step (4G) in a progression from GSM, a 2G standard, to UMTS, the 3G technologies based upon GSM. LTE provides significantly increased peak data rates, the potential for 100Mbps downstream and 50Mbps upstream, reduced latency, scalable bandwidth capacity, and backward compatibility with the existing GSM and UMTS technologies.

The table below shows mobile data standards: the improved peak downlink and uplink data rates are approximately five times faster than 3GPP release 7, and the improved round-trip time is also five times better than 3GPP release 7.

Evolution Technology: the upper layers of LTE are based upon TCP/IP, which is an all-IP network similar to the current state of wired communications. LTE supports mixed types of data: text, voice, video and messaging traffics; LTE uses OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) for downlink access, SC-FDMA (Single Carrier- Frequency Division Multiple Access) for uplink access and MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) antenna technology similar to that has been used in the IEEE 802.11n wireless local area network (WLAN) standard. The higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver is enabled by MIMO, while OFDM provides improved coverage and throughput especially in dense urban areas.

Mobile operators can upgrade the existing infrastructure to support LTE rather than starting from scratch. As a 4G technology, LTE becomes increasingly important to mobile operators as the data traffics grows on their networks.

Mobile Data Standards