LTE 4G
More info
- Released
- Type
- Mobile standard
The mobile generation that made the network all-IP and made mobile broadband ordinary.
Standardised by 3GPP and in service from 2009 (TeliaSonera in Stockholm and Oslo went first). It uses OFDMA on the downlink and MIMO to multiply capacity. The architectural change mattered most: LTE has no circuit-switched core at all, everything is packets.
Voice therefore needed a new answer — VoLTE — or fallback to 3G. LTE-Advanced added carrier aggregation. The networks will persist for years yet as the anchor for 5G in non-standalone mode.