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A recent customer survey has demonstrated that people are now including 4G technologies in the “must-have features” list when buying a smartphone. As evolved 3G technology are now considered 4G, there are a few handsets which do not support 4G. The problem is that current technologies aren’t very reliable, offer poor speeds while “moving”, and it drains the battery too fast. Well, a new standard called IMT-Advanced has been approved by the International Telecommunications Union in Switzerland.

According to ITU, the new standard is going to offer 10 times faster speeds than 4G LTE technologies and 100 times faster speeds than 3G networks. Although the new standard hasn’t been referred to as “5G” it’s clear that the public will call it this way considering how fast download and upload speeds will be available for the users.

IMT-Advanced will be so advanced that it will make current 3G smartphone technologies to seem like very old dial-up connections, Hamadoun Touré said. The ITU secretary-general added that the new standard is even faster than the majority of fiber optic connections for PCs.

The previous standard approved by ITU was called IMT-2000 and it consisted of 3G and evolved 3G technologies including HSPA, LTE, and WiMax. This would mean that LTE and WiMax are nothing more than 3G technologies, while IMT-Advanced networks are in fact 4G. The problem is that the public disagrees with this aspect, but the ITU says that the criteria is not important.

The ITU said that there are two technologies which fall into the IMT-Advanced category: LTE Advanced and WirelessMAN Advanced. The former is the next-generation LTE technology, while the latter is the next-gen WiMAX technology.

Currently, 3G technologies offer 14.4Mbps download and 5.76Mbps upload speeds, but only in perfect conditions. If you move and if the signal strength is not “full,” then you will not be able to use those speeds. 4G standards like LTE and WiMax can offer up to 100Mbps download / 50Mbps upload speeds, and 128Mbps / 64Mbps speeds.

Like said, these speeds will decrease dramatically if you’re moving and it even depends on how fast you’re moving. If you’re on foot, speeds will decrease a little, and if you go by car, train, airplane, etc it becomes “annoying” to access websites.

Fortunately, you will have to say goodbye to these situations once carriers begun building their IMT-Advanced infrastructures. According to the ITU, LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN Advanced will offer speeds of 100Mbps when moving, while top speeds of 1Gbps will be available to the users when stationary. That’s 10 times better than current 4G networks, and 100 times better than 3G networks.

When IMT-Advanced will finally be implemented, more internet connections will be available in trains, airplanes, and other means of transportation. The ITU said that users will download movies and full MP3 albums in less than a minute which is faster than most home broadband connections.

The carriers are very excited by this new standard because it will avoid traffic congestion and outages. Currently, it depends how many users access data services from the same area meaning that if there are many users accessing the web in the same place, their download speeds are reduced dramatically. IMT-Advanced comes with a new technology for dynamically sharing the network while allowing the mobile operators to use their spectrum in a very efficient manner. Basically, IMT-Advanced is everything current wireless technologies aren’t.

With 4G technologies just at the beginning, it will take several years before carriers will begin testing IMT-Advanced networks and many other years until they’ll be commercially introduced. We can only be helpful that the carriers will skip past several steps in LTE and WiMax development directly to LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced.