Last week Nortel sold its 3G access technologies business to its rival Alcatel and then promptly announced that 3G was dead on arrival. Fourth-generation (4G) mobile data services delivered over cellular networks that could potentially offer 40Mbit/s of bandwidth to end-users are the future, of course. Just like they said six years ago about 3G. Nonetheless the vendor's 4G plans mean big things for IPTV: wireless. While many of the mobile carriers here at CTIA I.T. are not too happy about all the 4G talk referencing WiMAX (it's not a cellular technology, so how can it be a cellular generation), a 4G future based on whatever technology is sure to come--most say by the magic year of 2010--for the U.K. at least. Darryl Edwards, European president of Nortel, said that OFDM-based, not WiMAX-based 4G, will be the cornerstone of mobile multimedia services like IPTV moving forward--music to the carriers' ears, no doubt.
For more on the 4G future and 3G being dead:
- see this article from Computing