When you use your smart phone, you must have seen 4G sign on your device’ screen, sometimes you also even noticed LTE or 4G LTE instead of 4G. Though the Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and fourth generation (4G) networks were mainly not only introduced at a time but also often marketed together. Both 4G and LTE are different.
4G technology offers a much faster speed, more stability, and access to a larger variety of online activities, while LTE/Long Term Evolution is a half-point between 3G and 4G that provides high-speed broadband and mobile data. However, both the technologies (4G and LTE) have certain similarities, which are given below.
- Both are cellular network technologies.
- They can be used on the same device.
- Compared to 3G technology, these two wireless networks are better in terms of performance.
- Data consumption will remain the same if you perform the same functions over both the networks.
So now let us see difference between LTE and 4G along with Smart 4G Tester, 4G LTE Tester, 4G Network Tester and VOLTE Testing tools & Equipment and Smart Best wireless site survey software, site survey tools for wireless networks & Wifi site survey software app in detail.
What is Fourth Generation network or 4G?
4G is short for the fourth generation of cellular networking technology that offers a stationary speed of up to 1GBps. The technology came into the picture in the late 2000s, 4G came with far greater bandwidth speed and proposed a drastic improvement as compared to 3G. With 4G, users can avail a high upload speed of up to 50mbps, download and stream live high-definition (HD) videos and participate in voice over internet protocol (VoIP) with a speed of up to 150Mbps.
Pros of 4G –
- It is faster than LTE.
- It has reduced latency, hence allowing clear voice and video calls.
What is Long Term Evolution or LTE?
LTE stands for Long Term Evolution and is a specific type of 4G technology called 4G LTE. LTE is an upgrade to 3G in cellular network technology, much faster than 3G and does not meet the 4G standards set by authorities. Most importantly, LTE is self-organizing network that means if there is an outage between a call session, the call will be rerouted to other paths automatically and afterward, the network will come back to an optimally designed path once the service is restored.
Pros of LTE –
- LTE doesn’t consume as much battery as compared to 4G.
- Data consumption (technology the downloads that can be finished in a fixed time) with LTE is noticeably less than 4G technology.
When a question comes, is LTE better than 4G? The answer comes with NO. 4G is better than LTE as it provides increased speed, high performance, and a better experience in both internet usage and calling functionalities. Neither LTE use more data than 4G, not 4G use more data than LTE as data consumption will remain the same when you download the same type of file over 4G and LTE, for example, if you are downloading something about a 20 MB that will consume the same amount of data on both 4G and LTE networks.
Difference between 4G and LTE
- 4g IS THE Fourth Generation of cellular network technology and LTE is an upgrade to 3rd generation cellular network technology.
- 4G offers faster data speed, whereas LTE offers comparatively slow data speed.
- Highly reduced latency is provided by 4G hence the network responds a faster response to your commands, but in the case of LTE, its latency is higher than 4G hence it responds slower to your commands.
- On the 4G network, both voice calls and video calls are of superior quality, whereas on LTE, the quality of voice and video calls is inferior as compared to 4G.
- 4G provides a seamless experience while playing online games but on LTE, you will experience some lag time during online gaming sessions.
Conclusion
Whether it’s 4G or LTE, both networks need network testing solutions to evaluate network performance for providing better QoE and QoS. You can choose RantCell to meet such requirements. RantCell can be opted for indoor or walk testing, RF drive testing, video streaming, 5G network testing, crowdsourcing mobile network testing, and many more. MNOs can conduct network tests using RantCell to identify issues on 5G/4G coverages.
