So I'm curious... The name LTE means Long Term Evolution. What exactly are/were we evolving from and over what term? It just seems weird to have 3G, LTE, and then 5G. What happened to the LTE wording/name/meaning?
In reality, they are all derived from the same 3GPP standard [1], the generations (3G, LTE, 4G, 5G, ...) just being labels applied to particular releases of the underlying standard. In git terms, the underlying 3GPP standard is the "master" branch and the releases are tags. Happily it is all freely available.
To answer your question, LTE referred to the intermediate stages between 3G and 4G. The labels are a bit arbitrary and interpretation of exactly what the label refers to varies with what the carrier is trying to sell.
It was an upgrade to 3G UMTS, the long-term evolution for the third generation as a stopgap to delaying 4G development. The industry then gave up on the 4G proper and rebadged 3G/3.5G/3.9G LTE upgrade into LTE/4G LTE, and moved leftover elements onto 5G and 6G.
It’s kind of repeating with 5G NSA(Non-Standalone)/5G SA(Standalone)/5G mmWave branding, it seems the marketing parts of telecommunication industry always wants to rebadge backported technology as the mainstream next generation, and engineering divisions wants to move onto one generation ahead.
