China Unicom's 42M Controversy: What Is 4G?

Recently, China Unicom officially announced its integrated 4G/3G terminal strategy and released what it claims to be as many as "61 4G LTE, 42M, and innovative products." Are all these terminals related to 4G? Is 42M 4G? Industry insiders actually know the answer: clearly not.

4G Peak Rate Requires at Least 100Mbps

Currently, the industry uses terms such as 4G, LTE, LTE-Advanced, 42M, and HSDPA. What is the relationship among them? Let's first look at what 4G is.

Many organizations worldwide have given different definitions of 4G. However, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) represents the general views of various countries, and is therefore the recognized organization for accurately defining 4G and setting its standards.

The international 4G standard was established on January 18, 2012. At that time, the ITU held a plenary meeting of the 2012 Radiocommunication Assembly, with six standards as candidates for 4G. Ultimately, three 4G international standards were formally reviewed and approved at the meeting: LTE-Advanced, WirelessMAN-Advanced (802.16m), and TD-LTE-Advanced, which was led by China.

From a technical perspective, the 3G standard rate defined by the ITU over a decade ago was only 364K/s, which was later evolved to HSPA (with rates of 7.2Mbps and 14Mbps) and HSPA+ (with rates of 21Mbps, 42Mbps, and 84Mbps). By the LTE era, the requirement was to provide peak rates of 100Mbps downlink and 50Mbps uplink.

Strictly speaking, LTE is only the initial phase of 4G as defined by the ITU, because the ITU named the next-generation standard IMT-Advanced as the international standard at that time.

As the name suggests, LTE-Advanced is an upgraded version of LTE technology. LTE can achieve peak rates of 100Mbps, while LTE-Advanced can reach 150Mbps or even 300Mbps. For example, the three major operators in South Korea have already taken the lead globally in achieving 150Mbps 4G rates and are planning to increase speeds to 300Mbps within two years.

Clearly, if a peak rate of 100Mbps cannot be achieved, it is certainly not 4G.

42M Falls Within the 3G Category

So we can return to the earlier topic. At the end of 2013, at the CCTV Financial Forum, a senior executive of China Unicom stated that China Unicom would further upgrade to 42Mbps in major cities and most parts of the country, adding that "this rate has been recognized as a 4G network in many countries." This claim of labeling the 42M network as a 4G network is clearly far-fetched, because without reaching a peak rate of 100Mbps, it cannot be counted as 4G.

In fact, both China Unicom and the industry generally refer to 42Mbps as HSPA+, which is a relatively new evolution of WCDMA and falls within the 3G category. Even a network twice as fast as 42Mbps would still only be considered a higher stage of 3G development, equivalent to 3.9G, but still not 4G.

Overseas, 42M Networks Are No Longer Labeled as 4G

So why does China Unicom dare to say that "this rate has been recognized as a 4G network in many countries"? This is because in the United States, a handset manufacturer once, at the request of major U.S. operator Verizon, made its phones display 4G after connecting to a 42Mbps HSDPA network. Some jokingly noted that this pseudo-requirement only existed in Verizon's operator configuration file, and that on any other operator's network, it would not display as 4G.

A spokesperson for U.S. telecom operator AT&T, Bloom, also publicly stated: "I think companies need to be cautious not to mislead users into believing that HSPA+ represents 4G technology." To this day, no operator labels 42M networks as 4G.

Therefore, it is clear that TD-LTE, which China Mobile is currently vigorously promoting, is a 4G standard, and TD-LTE was originally selected as one of the branches of the LTE-Advanced standard for inclusion in the 4G standards; this was mainly proposed by China. China Telecom and China Unicom have also obtained 4G licenses for the TD-LTE standard, but the issuance of 4G licenses did not mention the issuance of licenses for 42M networks. In fact, China Unicom has already built 42M networks in some places, because 42M networks do not fall within the 4G category and do not require approval. How many to build and how to build them are entirely Unicom's own matters.

Source: 21CN