The Many Faces of 3G

An anonymous reader writes "Did you ever notice how each new generation of cell-phone tech gets branded '3G,' and the previous thing is retroactively downgraded to some lesser number of Gs? An MIT engineer explains why in this brilliant essay about '3G' over the last 10 years, showing how the cell carriers have kept offering it and swiping it away to sell more stuff. He cites numerous Cingular/AT&T and Sprint press releases showing how the companies have made '3G' into a brand name ideally suited for amnesiac consumers. Meanwhile, no cell carrier is foolish enough to sell you bottom-line throughput like an ISP in 1996 — you could actually hold them to that (PDF)."

Comments

Re:I have often wondered about this.

[commodore64_love]

>>>He said that he feels

Oh well that makes it okay then. :-) If I say I "feel" that government taxation is too high, I don't have to actually prove it, or back it up with numbers do I? Maybe I am being anal but I simply thought the poster should be corrected when he said his cellphone was as slow as a 2 kbit/s line.

His comment was as "off" as if I were to say the national debt is $13 billion. (Hint: It's actually trillion.) Or if I said the EU lies about 3 miles away from the US. Or it only took the astronauts 0.003 days to reach the moon. Or 1000 + 1000 = 2.

I mean: 2400 is really, really slow. We're talking Commodore=64 slow. I doubt anybody's cellphone literally takes an hour to download a webpage.