With yesterday's announcement by Verizon of its LTE (Long-Term Evolution) 4G network, the battle of the 4G mobile networks has officially started. It all started with Sprint and Clear, which Sprint owns 50% of, with their 4G WiMax network that was launched a couple of years ago and is now available in about 60 markets including Los Angeles and San Francisco officially yesterday. T-Mobile entered the game a few months ago with its enhanced 3G HSPA+ network with "4G speeds" and AT&T recently announced that their upgraded 3G HSPA 7.2 network with "4G speeds" will be available by the end of 2010. While technically, none of these networks are actually 4G as defined by the International Telecommunication Union's strict definition , they are all many times faster than 3G with download speeds from 3 to 21 megabits per second, depending on which network, compared to 0.6-2.1 megabits per second for 3G. The ITU defines 4G as network technology that must be IP-based and use orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), which none of the current networks are. The other main requirement is that the technology needs to support peak download speeds of 100Mbps. The current flavors of LTE and WiMax are not that fast and neither is the technology T-Mobile is using, which is called HSPA+. To make sense of all the new 4G choices, we wanted to compare the various offerings to make sense of it all.
