4G is one of those terms that keep coming back through marketing brochures for what the latest technologies happen to be in the cellphone market. Every carrier claims to have true 4G, and has been claiming that for years, regardless of what they actually use. The reason was simple because the real 4G specification, expected to be drafted by the International Telecommunication Union, was no where to be found. In fact, the ITU took way longer than being expected to come up with a decision, likely because of massive lobbying campaigns. After all, which company wants to have to redesign its entire network just to be able to keep saying they are 4G? Now however, they ITU has decided itself.What does this mean for carriers and users? First,let’s see what 4G really is. As expected, LTE is central to the ITU strategy,but more precisely,the organization went with LTE-Advanced,which is a stricter version of traditional LTE. To qualify as 4G,a network has to provide 100Mbps connections over wireless,and 1 Gbps over wired. The whole network has to be fully IPv6 compliant. Frequencies have to be variable over 40MHz to avoid interference. Finally, global roaming has to be seamless, along with transitions between wirless and wired connections. This is a real step forward, and a good decision, which ensures that real 4G services will meet a good level of services. Technically, LTE-Advanced is just one of two new standard that are now under the umbrella called IMT-Advanced. The other one is WiMAX 2 which is a further refinement of the WimMAX protocol. Based on the paragraph above,to qualify as 4G, a network has to satisfy () criteria. The transitions between wireless and wired connections have to be (). LTE-Advanced is a standard belonging to (). A.two B.three C.four D.five A.limited B.possible C.seamless D.deployed A.WiMAX B.WiMAX 2 C.IPv6 D.IMT-Advanced