Competing industry groups behind LTE and WiMAX technologies are battling to be involved in the ITU-R’s proposed IMT-Advanced standard, according to a report by Unstrung. The report states that IMT-Advanced’s target is to deliver 100Mb/s in the wide area with high mobility, and 1Gb/s in hotspot areas with low mobility, specifications that are referred to by some as ‘4G.’ An ITU-R working group is expected to decide on the technical requirements and the evaluations criteria for the standard when it meets in Dubai at the end of June. The deadline for submission is expected to be around October 2009, says Unstrung.

The report claims that WiMAX backers at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and LTE supporters at the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), are already working on their proposals for this future standard, despite the fact that neither mobile WiMAX nor LTE have yet experienced official commercial network launches of their own. 3GPP earlier this month started work on its new proposal, dubbed ‘LTE-Advanced,’ whilst the IEEE released earlier this a year a draft system description document for 802.16m, its proposed successor to the existing mobile WiMAX 802.16e standard.