LTE Advanced

[3] In August 2019, the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) reported that there were 304 commercially launched LTE-Advanced networks in 134 countries.

[8] Besides the peak data rate 1 Gb/s as defined by the ITU-R, it also targets faster switching between power states and improved performance at the cell edge.

[10] The work by 3GPP to define a 4G candidate radio interface technology started in Release 9 with the study phase for LTE-Advanced.

Being described as a 3.9G (beyond 3G but pre-4G), the first release of LTE did not meet the requirements for 4G (also called IMT Advanced as defined by the International Telecommunication Union) such as peak data rates up to 1 Gb/s.

LTE Advanced also introduces multicarrier to be able to use ultra wide bandwidth, up to 100 MHz of spectrum supporting very high data rates.

Example performance: 100 MHz aggregated bandwidth, LTE-Advanced provides almost 3.3 Gbit peak download rates per sector of the base station under ideal conditions.

Advanced network architectures combined with distributed and collaborative smart antenna technologies provide several years road map of commercial enhancements.

In order to improve the quality of service for users in hotspots and on cell edges, heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are formed of a mixture of macro-, pico- and femto base stations serving corresponding-size areas.

IDC features are designed to ameliorate disturbances within the user equipment caused between LTE/LTE-A and the various other radio subsystems such as WiFi, Bluetooth, and the GPS receiver.

The ongoing work on LTE-Advanced[16] in Release 12, amongst other areas, concentrates on addressing issues that come about when users move through HetNet, such as frequent hand-overs between cells.

[49][50] It is an evolution of LTE Advanced (LTE-A) cellular standard supporting data rates in excess of 3 Gbit/s using 32-carrier aggregation.

Additionally, it incorporates several new technologies associated with 5G, such as 256-QAM, Massive MIMO, LTE-Unlicensed and LTE IoT,[51][52] that facilitated early migration of existing networks to enhancements promised with the full 5G standard.