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A few weeks ago, Verizon Wireless, one of the largest wireless carriers in the world, announced the selection of Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology for its next-generation, 4G, wireless network. It plans to test the mobile broadband technology throughout next year.

LTE , backed by the 3G Partnership Project, is one of three technologies competing to replace mobile operators' third-generation (EV-DO for CDMA carriers like Verizon; UTMS/HSPDA for operators GSM operators like AT&T) wireless networks. In addition to LTE, there's WiMAX and UMB (short for Ultra Mobile Broadband) as well.

Interestingly, although UMB is seen by many as the natural path for CDMA carriers to take—after all, it is backed by CDMA-creator Qualcom—Verizon chose to go with LTE instead, which had been seen as the natural migration path for GSM operators.

Sprint, another CDMA carrier, is going with WiMax, an Intel favorite, instead of UMB or LTE for its 4G network. It plans to cover tens of millions of people by 2009 with WiMax technology; but at performance levels not quite up to 4G standards.

It's going to be some time before we see anything approaching true 4G performance from anyone.

All of these technologies are supposed to eventually deliver data-transfer performance in the range of 100 megabits/second to 1 gigabit/second. It'll likely be at least couple of years before you start to see any widespread deployment of true 4G networks. And the higher performance range of these networks won't be seen for some years after that.

In addition to considerably better performance, all the 4G technologoies—unlike today's wireless networks, which are based on traditional circuit switched/packet switched technology—are packet switched only, making IP (Internet Protocol) an essential component to better deliver applications and services, just like the Web.

Through IP, carriers can directly address and route (and therefore support) a wider variety of devices, for example. It is also supposed streamline access to voice, data, streamed multimedia and other (some yet to be thought up) applications and services—in other words, to "anything, anytime, anywhere.”

For more, see this story at internetnews.com.