Forget the 4G marketing argument, ITU acknowledges US carriers have 4G

At the beginning of this month I noted that Verizon announced their 4G rollout and questioned if any of these fast US networks were really 4G. At that time, none of them were considered 4G, but since then I learned that the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) issued a report and expanded the 4G definition so that the WiMAX, LTE, and HSPA+ networks in the US are now considered 4G networks so we can finally put that marketing vs. reality question to bed.

The ITU issued a press release on 6 December and the term used for 4G is IMT-Advanced. The ITU now considers these US technologies as IMT-Advanced so we can now acknowledge that AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint are 4G networks, although they do still have varying speeds and coverage that is highly dependent on your geographic location. Let's now look to 2011 for the 4G handsets since we currently only have a couple from T-Mobile and a couple from Sprint to use.