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ITU's Definition Aside, T-Mobile Pushes 4G Label In New Ad Campaign
snydeq writes "T-Mobile has officially joined Sprint in pushing the promise of '4G' mobile services on consumers, despite the fact that, according to the ITU standards body, neither carriers' offerings constitute 4G mobile technology. In Sprint's defense, it has been advertising its WiMax-covered areas as 4G for nearly a year — technically not a lie because until last month 4G didn't mean anything, InfoWorld's Galen Gruman reports. But now that the ITU has provided a standard against which the FCC and FTC can judge truth in advertising, T-Mobile's new 4G ad campaign is a 'bald-faced lie,' Gruman writes."
National ad campaigns take more than a month to coordinate, though — if the term was basically free-floating until last month (with quite a few candidate standards over the years), it seems hard to condemn companies too harshly for using a marketing catch-phrase.
it seems hard to condemn companies too harshly for using a marketing catch-phrase.
Really? The whole purpose of the FTC is to insure companies don't use misleading catch-phrases. If a company sells 4G service, and another company falsely claims they do and gains customers, then yes, the first company is injured. They spent more money to actually provide the service that the second company only claimed.
Not only is it EASY to get harsh, but when companies flatly lie to customers, the price *should* be many times the amount of profit they made using the lie. Brushing it off as "only a marketing catch-phrase" is ignorant at best.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Does this mean I can get out of my contract now without an ETF?
These phones now go to 11.
I guess marketing won out. 4G is everything on data, while 3G is data/voice separated.
T-Mobile has been having some very competitive speed rates compared to Sprint/Clear's WiMax service, so anyone who offers faster wireless speeds is appreciated.
Now, if we can firmly plan the boot in the derriere of the cellular companies and get them to start getting Advanced LTE out on a large scale, we'll be set.
I think it will be a long while before we see this follow through! I have heard Sprint talk about 4G and how great their service is... but I have yet to see them follow through on that!
Hmm, no.. I'm not finding myself having any trouble doing this whatsoever.
Everybody knew there would be -a standard- referred to as 4G eventually... hijacking that for "marketing catch phrase" purposes gains them no sympathy other than from other marketeers.
Think of it this way.. if Microsoft were to start offering "IE9 with HTML 6 support" where "HTML 6" is not clearly defined, would you have any trouble whatsoever condemning them?
As much as i'd love to have the speeds the ITU declares 4g, I find it extremely rude they put such a high "requirement" to label 4G after 4G has been used as the name for the next level of speeds already.
Sprints WiMax network IS a different technology that gives higher speeds than 3G, so why wouldn't it be called 4G? its the 4th generation of tech.
For the ITU to come and say "no, you're not 4G, your 3.5G" is stupid.
They need to make their specs 6G or so, as for now those requirements are pretty far fetched.
Ignore the ITU, Sprint and Verizon do have 4G, just someones getting a lil too hopeful in the ITU dept.
When standards places start getting unrealistic, they lose the value of trying to follow them...
condemn them harshly. I'm tired of marketing speech in lieu of specific, technical, facts. It become so much easier for average Joe consumer to believe in unicorns and white elephants when the marketing department is in charge. Unicorns and white elephants of course come with lofty price tags and a greater popularity which exclude legitimately superior products from the market.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
This is stupid. The designators 2G 3G 4G have never been anything but simplistic marketing terms for grouping protocols with similar relative performance relative. LTE and WiMax both deliver significant improvements over previous technologies, so they need some designator to describe this to the general public. ITU drew an arbitrary line that excludes these technologies from being called 4G, while incremental improvements on them (LTE Advanced) do qualify. Why should a major upgrade be given a .5 designator, while minor improvement on that increments the major number?
These networks aren't any less capable as a result of ITUs announcement - it is the term 4G that is now less useful.
I'm really sick of people being able to get in contact with me whenever they want, it makes it very hard to nap in the afternoon. What I want is a carrier to offer a service that causes me to not get all the stupid calls that cut into relaxation time.--- Boss: "Why didn't you answer your phone last night, I had a stupid problem that should have wasted hours of your time!" Me: "Oh, sorry, my new Zero G cell phone only takes calls from people within 25 feet of me and only works from 8am-4pm with two hours off for lunch." Boss: "Oh, ok. Keep up the good work".
I have been working in the IT/Telecom/Wireless areana for 15 years now, and everytime one of those Sprint 4G adds come on, my blood really begins to boil - my wife doesn't understand why this gets me angry (she is not technical at all). I wish that people/companies/marketing would get the fact that there are standards and "bending the truth" does actually do harm. Language means something, standards mean something.
The article wasn't very enlightening. So what is the standard for 4G?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
T-mobile's own 4G "launch" phone doesn't distinguish in the interface between the HSPA "3G" and the HSPA+ "4G" as far as i can tell. The user interface used to say "G" "E" "3G" for GPRS, EDGE and HSPA now was just changed to say "G", "E" and "H" as far as i can tell.
Also, i live in one of the cities that supposedly has this coverage but I still only see speeds usually less than 1 Mbps down though now i get almost 2Mbps upload speed for whatever that's worth. Perhaps i should go around downtown in search of the supposed fast speeds.
Fortunately, 1 Meg is fine for my usage of the phone as i just use it for maps, web browsing and email etc, and the G2 has been a good phone, but the marketing around this stuff is deplorable as usual. (I say as usual because i've been paying for their unlimited data plan for something like 7 years now and the actual capabilities of the phones/network pretty much lag the advertising by one full generation.)
15 USC 1125(a) says:
(a) Civil action
(1) Any person who, on or in connection with any goods or services, or any container for goods, uses in commerce any word, term, name, symbol, or device, or any combination thereof, or any false designation of origin, false or misleading description of fact, or false or misleading representation of fact, which—
(A) is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities by another person, or
(B) in commercial advertising or promotion, misrepresents the nature, characteristics, qualities, or geographic origin of his or her or another person’s goods, services, or commercial activities,
shall be liable in a civil action by any person who believes that he or she is or is likely to be damaged by such act.
C'mon, consumers, let's get lawsuity.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
The question is even if there was a plan, had the term 4G been trademarked previously? If not, then wouldn't Sprint own the term irrespective of what the crystal ball foretells.
you're being told to buy something new and expensive, and you're being told lies about it. this hasnt changed for the majority of the technological frontiers expansion. the gigabyte was 1024 megs, you were told a nice even 1000.
computer monitors often had higher resolution than 1080P, you were told 1080p trumped all other image quality standards.
retina displays in iphones delivered a sharper display, you were told the display allowed "the highest resolution phone ever"
carriers routinely drop and mangle calls, offer shit dataservice, and overcharge. you were told they never dropped calls, offered the fastest internet, and offered affordable plans for the whole family.
Good people go to bed earlier.
How can there be any ambiguity about this? Either it's 4th Generation, or it's not. One of the linked articles talk about how "T-Mobile's '4G' network is based on a technology called HSPA+. For years, it has been considered more of a 3.5G technology than real 4G."
No such thing as a half-gen. A generation is simply a (hopefully improved) iteration of a specific thing. The ITU issuing a statement as to what they think 4G is becomes meaningless, if you're trying to use an inappropriate term to describe something; It would be like measuring length in "purples". I already didn't attach any significance to the term "4G", at least not pertaining to speed, because it seemed nonsensical to do so. Advertisers like to use buzzwords, sure, but if you're going to attempt to regulate that by defining the buzzwords as something that cannot etymologically be explained in that manner, then I'll start ignoring the definitions, too.
"I'm going to orange my jumping until it shifts orangutans." Stick that in your buzzword pipe and snorkel it.
If you want to get right down to it, the generations should be described as something like this:
G1: Can-and-string voice communications
G2: Wired voice communications
G3: Wireless voice communications
G4: ??? (Cybernetically-implanted wireless voice communications, maybe?)
Anything short of that won't be 4G enough. "Using 'generation' to describe speed" appears to be the issue, here, and it may be disingenuous for the advertisers to take advantage of consumers' lack of knowledge, but I can't assign blame (or responsibility) to them for their customers' ignorance.
--
No, I didn't read the article. Did you?
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
The Solution for the ITU, FCC, et al., is to abandon the term '4G' - it's already out in the wild. I don't think they can really enforce this - basically, Sprint, etc. are 'grandfathered'. Back when 2G, or 3G were being considered, an appropriate standards body like the ITU should have Trademarked the term 4G, so this could never have happened. But it has, too bad.
So the answer is to create a new, catchy trademarked term, which people can only use the trademark if they *actually conform to the standard*. Something similar in concept to the "Wifi" trademark - I may be wrong, but I believe you cannot call your product "Wifi" if it actually isn't fully conforming, because it's a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, and you need permission from the trademark holder. The problem with "4G" was that companies started using it before anyone had trademarked it, so if it's demonstrably better than '3G', and there's no definition of '4G', I suppose you can't really say it's *not* 4G. Someone else can't come along after the fact and define 4G after someone's already started using it.
If 4G is now defined and incorrect for Sprint and T-Mobile to use, the solution is simple - they should start advertising their networks as 5G, since it's not defined yet.
Then when 5G is ratified, they can claim they were years ahead of the competition, and technology for that matter...
But now that the ITU has provided a standard against which the FCC and FTC can judge truth in advertising, T-Mobile's new 4G ad campaign is a 'bald-faced lie,' Gruman writes."
This looks like a job for... Felten-man!! Dum-Da-Da-Dum!!!!
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
GSM/UMTS is a standard. CDMA2000 is a standard.
3G and 4G are not standards. They're marketing terms to describe the speed of data networks. 4G currently refers to anything drastically faster than 3G; how much faster is up for debate.
It's worth noting that HTML5 for a long time didn't have any kind of standards support, and was developed outside the W3C by Mozilla, Apple, and Opera.
This already happens, except with all companies with browsers. HTML5 is not a complete spec, nor will it be until around 2012. Any browser saying it is HTML5 is doing the same as T-mobile/Sprint were saying they are 4G.
-]Phreak Out[-
He meant bold-faced lie, not bald-faced. See here for proof: http://goo.gl/GOShs (it's a google-fight link in case I mistyped it).
Only if Sprint registered it, and a search at the PTO doesn't seem to indicate that it has been. (I'm not surprised, '4G' is really about as generic as '486', and that was declared untrademarkable... hence the term 'Pentium').
a better example is if Ford started to market their new cars "with full support for hovercraft landing pads"
Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of cell data in this country. The AT&T iPhone was the phone to own. Then the other guy came out with a 3G phone and service plan. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with a little thing called the 3GS. That's three g's and an s. For something-or-other. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened—the bastards went to four g's. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three g's and an s. Defunct antenna or no, suddenly we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five g's.
Sure, we could go to four g's next, like the competition. That seems like the logical thing to do. After all, three worked out pretty well, and four is the next number after three. So let's play it safe. Let's get a new iPhone and call it the 3GSTurbo. Why innovate when we can follow? Oh, I know why: Because we're a business, that's why!
You think it's crazy? It is crazy. But I don't give a shit. From now on, we're the ones who leave our customers using^W^W^W^W have the EDGE in the multi-g game. Are they the best a man can get? Fuck, no. AT&T is the best a man can get.
What part of this don't you understand? If two g's is good, and three g'sis better, obviously five g's would make us the best fucking cell network that ever existed. Comprende? We didn't claw our way to the top of the cellular provider game by clinging to the two-g industry standard. We got here by taking chances. Well, five g's is the biggest chance of all.
etc., etc.
If HTML1-5 were used freely by manufacturers and then they suddenly had their terminology hijacked by a standards body for HTML6, then not really, no.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Face it - we'd condemn Microsoft even if it actually did have HTML 6 support. The level of truthyness acceptable in advertising is a pretty low bar; consider "This is the famous Budweiser beer. We know of no brand produced by any other brewer which costs to much to brew and age..."
All generalizations are false, including this one. Mark Twain
It's worth noting that HTML5 for a long time didn't have any kind of standards support, and was developed outside the W3C by Mozilla, Apple, and Opera.
They formed a new group, the WHATWG, and according to Wikipedia:
The WHATWG was formed in response to the slow development of web standards monitored by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and its decision to abandon HTML in favor of XML-based technologies. The WHATWG mailing list was announced on 4 June 2004,[3] two days after the initiatives of a joint Opera–Mozilla position paper had been voted down by the W3C members at the W3C Workshop on Web Applications and Compound Documents.[4]
On 10 April 2007, the Mozilla Foundation, Apple and Opera Software proposed[5] that the new HTML working group of the W3C adopt the WHATWG’s HTML5 as the starting point of its work and name its future deliverable "HTML5". On 9 May 2007, the new HTML working group resolved to do that.[6]
I don't remember browsers being marketed as being "HTML5 compatible" until there was a strong body of work identifying what HTML5 was.
If WHATWG didn't move forward, we'd still be trapped by the monstrosity that is XHTML. They forked, got momentum then unified their work back into W3C. They did it the right way.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I can still have my alarms go off (an hour early sometimes!) and play my precious games without being bothered by a call.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Then it also hasn't been trademarked by the ITU.
I don't see how this is intentionally misleading - it definitely is Sprints fourth generation network, which is what 4G stands for. If anything it's the ITU who has hijacked something here, not Sprint.
Besides, 1G-4G are as much standards as the OSI model of networks is a standard. They aren't really standards, they are just categorizations of different mobile technologies. The actual standards, like CDMA, GSM, EDGE, EVDO, HSPA, etc. are inside the loose categorizations.
How fair is it that after T-Mobile and Sprint roll out their 4G network technologies the ITU arbitrarily decides these fourth generation networks aren't fourth generation networks? Who's really being heavy-handed here?
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I really find it offensive that T-Mobile is lying. If you cannot be honest in your offerings then you don't deserve me as your client. And I promise you you wont have me as one either why even try when the educated consumers will keep the non-educated from making foolish decisions. The ones that slip through will find it out and make them pay class action style. Its a bad stupid circle that T-Mobile is just asking to get burned in. And as for the rest of the accusations of the ads, I have yet to find an Android Phone that goes toe to toe with my iPhone 4. Don't LIE T-Mobile, period.
Oh, you mean like HTML5?
Don't actually go downtown for better speed, unless you're in a very small town. Buildings do nothing but deflect signals. Signal strength is likely better in a downtown park, even if it's full of trees, than between buildings.
I think the FCC and FTC should require that the allowable advertised rate/catchphrase for any mobile provider should be limited to the SLOWEST installed cell in their network.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
1G-4G aren't standards per se, they're performance metrics. Your specific standard either meets the appropriate ITU standard, or it doesn't. Everyone knows what the "Gs" mean (or at least used to), but the ITU doesn't formally use "G" in their specification names. So there's not much likelihood anyone can call Sprint or T-Mobile on this... other than informally, like here, in articles, etc.
It'll be interesting to see when someone actually does roll out real 4G. Will they take on the others and promote that they have the only "real" 4G, or will they give it a different name?
-Dave Haynie