ITU Rules That WiMax, LTE Don't Qualify As 4G

GMGruman writes "It's official: All those ads and vendor claims about 4G services being offered today or being right around the corner are fiction. The international standards body ITU has ruled that Clearwire's WiMax network and the LTE systems that Verizon and others are just starting to roll out are not in fact 4G services. Oops."

Comments

Who cares ?

[Anonymous Coward]

The last mile problem isn't the bottleneck , limited data plans , limited data rates , and limited bandwidth due to over-congested areas are the main problem.
Mobile service providers want to sell you expensive "minutes" , offering good data plans would turn them into ordinary Internet providers and everybody would be swinging sip phones and talking they're mouth off for 20$ a month.

Re:Who cares ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was using limited as in artificially limited. Most providers won't give you what the current technology provides. They will QOS it on the backbone like it's nobody's business .
As for the over-congested areas , they could de-congest those by adding more base stations with narrower angle antennas.But they won't. The only reason they'd rather shovel money into this tech rather than more of the old is because this way they can get more profit from either phone sales or the usual 2 year contract they come with.
And after they do that , the areas will still be congested same as they have been with 3.5G and 3G and gprs/edge before those.

Re:Lawsuit?

[Da_Reapa]

Maybe the phones themselves are 4G compatible, but the service isn't there for the phones.

Re:I just saw an ad on Hulu advertising Sprint 4G

[biryokumaru]

No, like you said, you're in the US. You can only win a lawsuit here if you're a multi-billion dollar corporation. Sorry.

Re:Lawsuit?

[l3v1]

Actually they might have a case here, since at Sprint you can find stuff all over about 4G Wireless Broadband Network and 4G Coverage and Speeds and First and Only Wireless 4G which clearly they can't provide, since their speeds seem a bit far from 4G standard specs.

Re:First large-scale LTE in the world?

[sznupi]

What Verizon calls "large scale" is just the Houston area initially, with other major metropolitan areas and large airports following. You didn't really thought it will be a rapid rollout throughout most of the land area of the US, right? (BTW, Sweden and Norway have significantly lower population density)

Marketing ...

[LordKaT]

Marketing claims to have a number. Engineers say otherwise.

Scott Adams finds more material to write about.

Re:Duh...

[Solandri]

It's mincing words. All those speeds are a lot higher than what passes for broadband in most of the U.S.

4G services?

[butlerm]

The international standards body ITU has ruled that Clearwire's WiMax network and the LTE systems that Verizon and others are just starting to roll out are not in fact 4G services.

Are not "in fact" 4G services? Unless the ITU has some sort of trademark on "4G", that is a ridiculous claim. Ultimately the marketplace will decide what is 4G and what isn't, and at this point it looks like the ITU is up for more ridicule than Sprint / Clearwire.

I understand that LTE is significantly different from its predecessors, which gives it as good a reason as any to claim to be "4G". Is "LTE-Advanced" so different from "LTE" to rationally claim that it should be "4G" and "LTE" not be?

Re:Duh...

[Ecuador]

Still, 21Mbit which is deployed in many countries and called 3G is close. In fact, at least a couple of countries have deployed HSPA+ at 28Mbit and the technology has a theoretical max of 56Mbit. And it is always called 3G or at most 3.5G. You can't go calling something 4G unless it is much faster as 3G was to 2G.