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Long Term Evolution (LTE) is a 4G wireless broadband technology developed by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), an industry trade group.

3GPP engineers named the technology "Long Term Evolution" because it represents the next step (4G) in a progression from GSM, a 2G standard, to UMTS, the 3G technologies based upon GSM. LTE provides significantly increased peak data rates, with the potential for 100 Mbps downstream and 30 Mbps upstream, reduced latency, scalable bandwidth capacity, and backwards compatibility with existing GSM and UMTS technology. Future developments could yield peak throughput on the order of 300 Mbps.

The upper layers of LTE are based upon TCP/IP, which will likely result in an all-IP network similar to the current state of wired communications. LTE will support mixed data, voice, video and messaging traffic. LTE uses OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) and, in later releases, MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) antenna technology similar to that used in the IEEE 802.11n wireless local area network (WLAN) standard. The higher signal to noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver enabled by MIMO, along with OFDM, provides improved coverage and throughput, especially in dense urban areas.

LTE is scheduled to be launched commercially in 2010 by Verizon Wireless and AT&T Wireless. T-Mobile and Alltel have also announced plans to roll out 4G capabilities based on LTE. These networks will compete with Clearwire's WiMAX for both enterprise and consumer broadband wireless customers. Outside of the US telecommunications market, GSM is the dominant mobile standard, with more than 80% of the world's cellular phone users. As a result, HSDPA and then LTE are the likely wireless broadband technologies of choice for most users. Nortel and other infrastructure vendors are focusing significant research and development efforts on the creation of LTE base stations to meet the expected demand. When implemented, LTE has the potential to bring pervasive computing to a global audience, with a wire-like experience for mobile users everywhere.

The standard includes:

Peak download rates of 326.4 Mbit/s for 4x4 antennas, 172.8 Mbit/s for 2x2 antennas for every 20 MHz of spectrum.

Peak upload rates of 86.4 Mbit/s for every 20 MHz of spectrum.

5 different terminal classes have been defined from a voice centric class up to a high end terminal that supports the peak data rates. All terminals will be able to process 20 MHz bandwidth.

At least 200 active users in every 5 MHz cell. (specifically, 200 active data clients)

Sub-5ms latency for small IP packets

Increased spectrum flexibility, with spectrum slices as small as 1.5 MHz (and as large as 20 MHz) supported (W-CDMA requires 5 MHz slices, leading to some problems with roll-outs of the technology in countries where 5 MHz is a commonly allocated amount of spectrum, and is frequently already in use with legacy standards such as 2G GSM and cdmaOne.) Limiting sizes to 5 MHz also limited the amount of bandwidth per handset

Optimal cell size of 5 km, 30 km sizes with reasonable performance, and up to 100 km cell sizes supported with acceptable performance

Co-existence with legacy standards (users can transparently start a call or transfer of data in an area using an LTE standard, and, should coverage be unavailable, continue the operation without any action on their part using GSM/GPRS or W-CDMA-based UMTS or even 3GPP2 networks such as cdmaOne or CDMA2000)

Support for MBSFN (Multicast Broadcast Single Frequency Network). This feature can deliver services such as Mobile TV using the LTE infrastructure, and is a competitor for DVB-H-based TV broadcast.

PU²RC as a practical solution for MU-MIMO. The detailed procedure for the general MU-MIMO operation is handed to the next release, e.g., LTE-Advanced, where further discussions will be held.

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