Nokia is promising gigabit data rates with the launch of 4.5G Pro technology from Q4 this year, while becoming the first network vendor to introduce the term 4.9G to the mobile industry.

The Finnish vendor said it will launch 4.5G Pro towards the end of 2016, powered by its AirScale radio portfolio. 4.5G Pro “will deliver ten times the speeds of initial 4G networks”, it promised.

4.5G Pro builds upon Nokia 4.5G technology (itself an official standard known as LTE Advanced Pro), for which the company already has more than 90 customers across the globe, it said. It will support five band carrier aggregation.

The Finnish vendor is also giving the mobile industry the 4.9G term, another decimal point introduced by a vendor in the road from 4G to 5G.

Huawei of course introduced the term 4.5G nearly two years ago, which it claims is an important step to meet connectivity demands while 5G is under development. Others regret its rise.

Before either 4.9G and 4.5G, Japanese operator NTT Docomo coined the phrase 3.9G some years ago to describe its evolution from 3G to 4G.

Nokia talks about 4.9G as part of the evolution from 4.5G Pro to 5G, bringing “significant capacity and data rate enhancements and network latency reductions to let users maintain a continuous 5G service experience complementing 5G radio coverage”.

Nokia said the technology will comprise features to further increase capacity and speeds to “several gigabits per second”. It will include allowing additional numbers of carriers to be aggregated, Nokia said.

4.9G will allow “highly directional antennas to be used and to allow signals sent via multiple transmit / receive paths to be added together”. And it will allow cloud-based networks with intelligence added to the edge in order to reduce latencies to less than 10ms.

Certainly, the mobile network vendor market is cranking up marketing efforts around the “G’s.” Earlier this week Ericsson claimed to be on track to launch 5G-ready kit next year, despite the fact no official standard will be declared before 2018.