Very sure about it. Just like you pointed out with the Windows 7 thing. Its all a marketing term to make their product sound better than the others. Real 4G has a minimum speed of 100 Mbit/s down as defined by the ITU.
As far as anyone is concerned LTE IS 4G. The ITU definition is inflated and unrealistic given the backhaul constraints of pretty much every network in the world. Do you even know what it would take to get the necessary resources to have every network ready for "LTE Advanced"?...Yeah..Even NTT DoCoMo arguably the best cellular network in the world (Japan) isn't ready for that (And they put Belus in canada to shame!). 1xRTT could be considered "3G" solely based on the minimum speed requirement by certain organizations. Anyways its really not worth fighting over but given that the ITU agreed LTE Advanced would be 4G I think its safe to call LTE 4G given its a HUGE step up from EvDO and in some cases HSPA+.
1G -
AMPS (800 Cellular) (USA) and
NMT (900Mhz) (Europe)
2G - Still pretty old school but consisted of "Digital AMPS" at first which would turn into
IS-95 then 1xRTT (CDMA2000) (all just evolutions).
Raw GSM with limited data services, I'm not even talking GRPS like less than 15kbs :O
"2.5G" -
GPRS aka General Packet Radio Service, really slow data but final packet based and not circuit switched. So always on data line billed by kilobyte and not time. GPRS gets like 100kbs MAX and I doubt you'll get that given voice is prioritized. GPRS was a big deal every GSM carriers spewed it all over their networks just in time for the crackberry crisis where people would check their email on the go (I remember thinking that was the coolest **** ever!).
"2.75G" -
EDGE aka Enhanced GPRS basically taking GPRS and putting it on steroids. You can also just throw EDGE in 2.5G if you don't like all these middle pieces in generations. EDGE can get up to 177kbs with the first version and 277 with the second version. EDGE just could not meet the 3G standard which was 384kbs! GSM technology was done.
3G ZOMGQWJAEFG!!!! - Requirement of 2Mbs stationary and 384kbs while mobile...so allot of the times verizons network doesn't even meet the standard! Go look at my speed test thread. Anyways in this we've got the rise of UMTS (HSPA with no upgrades so no HSDPA, HSUPA crap added RAW new tech) which would be used by AT&T/Cingular in the US. UMTS required all new cell sites, though the same antenna's could be used. Verizon's EvDO rev 0 only need a software upgrade on top of its exisiting 1xRTT network max speed of 2.4Mbs downlink but that was hard to get. EvDO rev a would allow for 3.1Mbs downlink still fast but everyone knew HSPA was going to beast EvDO with its large 5Mhz spacing vs EvDO's 1.25Mhz spacing.
"3.5G" - No real defintion here but Ill consider it more legit than some of these 4G claims that are just fancy UMTS. This is mostly HSDPA upgrades with HSUPA thrown in. HSDPA speed upgrades are 1.8mbs, 3.6mbs, 7.2mbs, 14.4mbs (well 14 really), and 21.1mbs generally 3.5G would be 7.2 and up however. Verizon really has no way to compete with this other than EvDO rev b which they were too much of a ***** to deploy anyway.
"4G" -
LTE Advanced, WiMAX, HSPA+ with MIMO and Dual carriers. We could argue this more but there's some history and background see the link below for some good info:
http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/17/2g-3g-4g-and-everything-in-between-an-engadget-wireless-prim/
EDIT: Mods I think we need a sticky on the cell technology just for reference. I would be happy to do even more research and write one up that or I know we have a few engineer esk guys on here who probably know 999999x more about this.
