What is the difference between 3G and 4 G technology?
Answers
The Difference
On the surface, the difference between 3G and 4G is pretty simple. The “G” is short for generation, so 3G and 4G represent the third and fourth generations of mobile broadband Internet. As a rule, provided that you’re on the same carrier, a 4G connection will be faster than a 3G one. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a 4G network of one carrier will always be faster than the 3G network of another.
To be advertised as 3G, a network is required to meet a set of technical standards for speed and reliability, and must offer peak data transfer rates of at least 200 kilobits per second. The first networks that met this standard rolled out in the U.S. around 2003, and as smartphones began to gain more widespread use, demand for faster mobile broadband access saw a corresponding rise. In just a few short years, this push for faster data rates drove the standard forward, and today 3G networks can be anywhere from 200 kbps to dozens of times that fast.
To be advertised as 4G, a network must offer peak data rates of at least 100 megabits per second for high mobility communication (users in cars, trains, etc.), and at least 1 Gigabit per second for low mobility communication (pedestrians and stationary users). Not all 4G networks are created equal though – they come in a variety of different flavors, and some are faster and more widely deployed than others. The most common deployments are LTE, WiMAX, and HSPA+, but LTE is undoubtedly the most widely used amongst major US carriers.
It’s also worth noting that each new generation of wireless broadband typically requires your cell phone provider to make upgrades on their towers, and therefore requires you to upgrade your phone so that it can send/receive signals through the new infrastructure. A 3G phone cannot communicate through a 4G network, but newer generations of phones are practically always designed to be backward compatible, so a 4G phone can communicate through a 3G or even 2G network.