ITU has completed the assessment of six candidate submissions for the global 4G mobile wireless broadband technology, otherwise known as IMT-Advanced. 

According to ITU, these proposals has resulted in two technologies, “LTE-Advanced” and “WirelessMAN-Advanced” and these are now true 4G technologies.

In its recent meeting in Chongqing, China, ITU’s Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) Working Party 5D, which is charged with defining the IMT-Advanced global 4G technologies, reached a milestone in its work by deciding on these technologies for the first release of IMT-Advanced. In the ITU-R Report the LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced technologies were each determined to have successfully met all of the criteria established by ITU-R for the first release of IMT-Advanced. The Report is expected to be approved by ITU Member States at the ITU-R Study Group 5 meeting in Geneva in late November 2010.

Following the success of the ITU-defined IMT-2000 (3G) systems, ITU-R launched the IMT-Advanced (4G) initiative with its strategic IMT future vision in 2002. It subsequently established the services, spectrum and performance requirements for IMT-Advanced as well as a detailed evaluation process. In an on-going partnership with the industry, the six proposals received by ITU in October 2009 were individually subjected to a rigorous assessment. 

IMT-Advanced (4G) provides a global platform on which to build the next-generations of interactive mobile services that will provide faster data access, enhanced roaming capabilities, unified messaging and broadband multimedia.