Noun, Abbr.
The distinction between 4G and 4G LTE is largely a matter of marketing, reflecting the historical development of 4G technology.
LTE, which stands for Long Term Evolution, was introduced to facilitate the transition from 3G to 4G. Initially, when 4G was defined in 2008, its technical specifications were challenging to achieve immediately.
LTE served as an intermediate solution, providing more bandwidth than 3G but not fully reaching the initial 4G goals, such as achieving speeds up to 100 Mbps.
In practice today, 4G LTE is often used synonymously with 4G, though technically, 4G LTE-A (LTE-Advanced) is the standard that meets the full speeds promised by early 4G specifications.
Here is a comparison for clarity:
- 4G LTE: Offers theoretical download speeds of about 150 Mbps, with real-life speeds around 20 Mbps. This translates to approximately 8 minutes to download 1GB of data.
- 4G LTE-Advanced: Offers theoretical speeds up to 300 Mbps, with real-world speeds around 42 Mbps, halving the download time to about 4 minutes for 1GB of data.
Example of 4G LTE in a sentence:
"4G LTE allows you to enjoy fast internet even without access to high-speed broadband."
Related Terms for 4G LTE: