China and Japan signed an agreement on August 26th to jointly develop research for a new worldwide standard to cover 4G. A spokesperson for Samsung, one of the key members of the 4G Forum, said that the technical specifics need to be “firmed up”, but significant research has already been performed in the area.

NTT and others have been researching 4G for some time, well before WiMax development began, but standards have not been formed as there is still debate on the uses of 4G. The original plans for 4G were to offer 100 Mbps wireless transmission. NTT has successfully blown through this barrier with a successful test of 1Gbps using their 4G technology, a Variable Spreading Factor-Spread Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (VSF-Spread OFDM) and a 4-by-4 Multiple-Input-Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna.