you know i think we'll start by defining what the heck a g is
yes i suppose it is that but it also refers to the generation of cell phone
network technology used by your provider's towers and the radio in your
mobile device so how many g's you have affects the features speed availability
and reliability of your mobile network
so 1g or first generation was analog
it didn't even support roaming didn't encode voice calls digitally and had no
support for mobile internet which i guess makes sense since that was pretty
much sci-fi when 1g was rolled out starting in the early 80s at any rate
good riddance to it it's successor 2g
rocketed us into the digital fast lane allowing voice calls to be transmitted
more efficiently via compression which you can learn more about here by the way
and cell phones to become smaller thanks to the reduced radio power requirements
awesome what we also got with 2g was confusion roaming to different
territories was much improved but only if the mobile network you were roaming
on used the same type of second generation network the main two of which
being cdma and gsm and while initial
true 2g offerings were too slow for a mobile internet experience beyond
text-based emails interim standards like gprs and edge
colloquially referred to as like two and a half g or 2.75 g could deliver data
rates as high as well much higher than the minimum 200 kilobit
per second transfer speed required to call something 3g which is why the line
is so blurry because carriers had to try and balance backwards compatibility and
future proofness with performance and coverage today not an easy thing to do
when you're trying to save all that money and third generation or 3g
networks didn't simplify matters at all with technologies like edge being
technically allowed to be marketed as 3g thanks to fulfilling the speed
requirements even though almost no one did that since it's an upgrade dead end
and not at all competitive with standards like wcdma whose later
upgrades like hspa and hspa plus could achieve pretty kick-ass mobile broadband
speeds in excess of a hundred megabit per second
okay so deep breath did 4g fourth generation make things
simpler the answer is yes and no the
term 4g is used pretty fast and loose by cell phone providers for one thing who
are trying to convince you that they have the fastest stuff but it also has a
few different real meetings so some companies use 4g to refer to a standard
called hspa plus which if you remember from like 20 seconds ago is actually
technically turbocharged 3g which is why many carriers now are differentiating
their long-term evolution or lte networks by specifically calling them
out as 4g lte lte offers enhanced voice quality with
hd voice which you can learn more about here and dramatically better downstream
data rates for watching youtube videos and streaming from music services like
spotify we're talking up to 300 megabit per second and on top of that you can
see dramatically better upstream performance too which is critical for
video calls and even mobile gaming in some cases but then is 4g lte the end of
the huge alphabet soup of different wireless names the answer is no i mean
there's a newer version of lte called lte advanced that is being marketed as
true 4g since lte wasn't technically 4g
then they kind of changed the rules so they could call it that for marketing purposes
so that's on the horizon offering even greater reliability due to its use of
several different lte frequency bands at once which is very important when you're
traveling around or in a densely populated city also there's one company
in south korea that has already rolled out what it calls giga lte which is
today capable of speeds of over one gigabit per second on compatible phones
from samsung and lg absolutely incredible as long as there's
a nearby tower so speaking of nearby towers will this kind of performance
ever be available in the technologically backward west
well perhaps not but at least those of us stuck under the oppressive heels of
our local carriers can take comfort knowing that the next generation of
south koreans will be enjoying the latest freemium games in glorious 4k
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