Unstrung reports that the International Telecommunication Union, Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) has approved the technical requirements for its proposed IMT-Advanced standard. The report claims that with the general specifications now set for IMT-Advanced – a proposed standard supposedly above and beyond the capabilities of mobile WiMAX and LTE technology – candidate technologies can from October be submitted to the ITU. Unstrung reports that the technical criteria was approved at a meeting in Dubai last month and is expected to be published on the IMT-Advanced website at the end of this week.

Two separate camps are already preparing their candidates; IEEE is working on its successor to the mobile WiMAX 802.16e standard called 802.16m, whilst 3GPP is developing an upgrade to LTE technology called LTE-Advanced. Criteria for IMT-Advanced is expected to include average downlink speeds of 100 Mb/s in the wide area network, and up to 1 Gb/s for local access or low mobility scenarios. Unstrung notes that another key criterion is low latency; less than 10 millisecond roundtrip delay and less than 100 milliseconds to set up a new session. Large spectrum allocations are also expected to be a big challenge for the mobile industry with the deployment of IMT-Advanced. The report adds that IMT-Advanced technologies set the mobile technology roadmap for the next 10-15 years and ITU-R is expected to complete its recommendation for the IMT-Advanced radio interface technology in early 2011. Before then, LTE and mobile WiMAX are regarded as the next future step in the evolution of mobile broadband technology.