The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Radiocommunication Assembly meeting in Geneva Switzerland on 18 January 2012 approved the specifications for next-generation mobile (cellular) technologies to be known as International Mobile Telecommunications-Advanced (IMT-Advanced). The official press release is at the ITU site
The ITU is a United Nation sponsored agency responsible for setting the international standards for mobile (cellular) communications. They determined that that "LTE-Advanced" and "WirelessMAN-Advanced" should be accorded the official designation of IMT-Advanced.
We will have to wait and see how quickly the vendors jump on the bandwagon and start to refer to their systems as IMT-Advanced or 5G. It only took a matter of days after the last plenary session in 2010 that amended the definitions of 3G and 4G for the vendors to tout their network as 4G even though there was no change with the in-service technology.
I hope to post more about IMT-Advanced in the near future.
