LTE stands for Long Term Evolution and is a registered trademark owned by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) for the wireless data communications technology and a development of the GSM/UMTS standards.
LTE was first proposed by NTT DOCOMO of Japan in 2004. The standard is developed by the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) and is specified in its Release 8 document series. The LTE standard was finalized in December 2008, and the first publicly available LTE service was launched by TeliaSonera in Oslo and Stockholm on December 14, 2009 as a data connection with a USB modem.
LTE evolved from an earlier 3GPP system known as the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), which in turn evolved from the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM).
The main purpose of LTE is to design in a way to provide a high throughput, low latency and support more active data users at a time.