I have just completed a 2-day course in the new wireless architecture called LTE. LTE is not necessary 4G, it depends on what each operator is talking about but the largest operator in Sweden, Telia-Sonera will be calling their LTE network for 4G so I guess the terminology will stick to it pretty soon. Ericsson is pretty careful in pointing out that the fourth generation would actually be LTE-Advanced which they are working on right now.

But time will tell. Enough to say that this is a very different radio approach from UTRAN with WCDMA and HSPA radio access and the core network has evolved further to be much faster putting more intelligence at the base station itself rather than higher up in the network. Basically LTE is just focused on setting up incredibly fast data pipes between you and your network and no matter if you use them for voice, online gaming, blogging, downloading music or streaming video will just affect how many radio resources are allocated to you.

It was quite exciting but also a very tight course with too many acronyms spinning around my head right now…