I thought the days of explaining technology acronyms was long gone.

There were times when I would routinely have to tell people what ASCII was and how to pronounce it. “DOS rhymes with “boss,” I must have written 10,000 times.

The original edition of PCs For Dummies had an entire chapter on acronyms. An entire chapter!

In the cell phone era, acronyms are once again rearing their UH, Ugly Heads. Here’s a rundown of what’s what and why you should care, though you really don’t need to care:

3G. The third generation of mobile communications standards. It’s the successor to 2G and the original 1G, which wasn’t called 1G until 2G came about.

4G. The fourth generation of mobile communications standards, the current big dog. It boasts speeds up to 100 Mbps, which puts it on a par with most local area networks. It’s very fast. The problem is that the so-called 4G phones available in the U.S. don’t offer true 4G speed.

LTE. This acronym stands for Long-Term Evolution, and it identifies a type of communications currently stuck between 3G and full, real 4G. You’ll note that the current crop of new cell phones offer “4G LTE” service, not real 4G. Still the 4G LTE solution is faster than 3G, and allows mobile devices to do fancy things like video chat and streaming download of music and movies.

GSM. Yet another TLA (three-letter acronym), this one standing for Global System for Mobile Communications. I don’t know why it’s not GSMC, but whatever. Basically, GSM defines the communications standards for cell phones. So if you have a GSM phone, it can access and use GSM networks.

CDMA. This acronym stands for — ready? — Code Division Multiple Access. There. I’m sure you feel better. It’s a cell phone communications standard that’s utterly incompatible with GSM. So you either have a GSM phone or a CDMA phone.

HSPA+. You’ll be overwhelmed with happiness when you know that this acronym stands for High Speed Packet Access. Somehow it’s related to CDMA, but not in your native alphabet.

Basically, when it comes to GSM, CDMA, and HSPA, all you need to know is that they’re different standards used by different cell phones to do whatever it is that the cell phone does. If your cell phone is of one type, then it cannot access a cellular network of the other type. That information comes into play only when roaming or traveling abroad.

Doubtless engineers will devise new standards and acronyms. The rules will remain the same, though: You can only use a network that matches your phone’s network, no matter what the acronym. The speeds will get better over time, of course.

There will be no quiz.