The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has officially agreed the standards for next-generation ‘IMT-Advanced’ mobile technology, which includes LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced. An ITU Radiocommunication Assembly meeting in Geneva agreed the standards following an evaluation against “stringent technical and operational criteria.”

LTE-Advanced is the next-generation version of LTE developed by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) with theoretical peak downlink speeds of around 100 Mb/s in the wide area and 1 Gb/s in fixed situations, low latency and wide spectrum bandwidths of up to 100Mhz. WirelessMAN-Advanced is the next-generation version of WiMAX 802.16e from the IEEE camp. In reality, LTE-Advanced is likely to become the de-facto technology for the IMT-Advanced standard, given the fact that the vast majority of operators are already backing LTE compared to WiMAX.

The new technology – regarded by some as the ‘true’ 4G – will provide new capabilities that go beyond 3G mobile technology (IMT-2000) and provide a wide range of packet-based telecommunications services supported by mobile and fixed networks.

ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré said the announcement was “a huge leap forward in state-of-the-art technologies, which will make the present day smartphone feel like an old dial up Internet connection.”

“IMT-Advanced would be like putting a fibre optic broadband connection on your mobile phone, making your phone at least 500 times faster than today’s 3G smartphones,” director of the ITU’s Radiocommunication Bureau, François Rancy, said. He added that IMT-Advanced will use radio-frequency spectrum more efficiently, meaning larger amounts of data will be able to be transferred on less bandwidth, helping networks cope with the expected increase in data traffic.

Ericsson has been testing LTE-Advanced technology in Sweden for some time while US operators AT&T and Sprint have both said they aim to deploy services using the technology in 2013. Japanese operator NTT Docomo said in February 2011 it planned to begin field experiments using the technology.