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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!
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.
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.
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.)
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.
My Blackberry Bold 9700 offers this service. It is called OFF. You activate this service by pressing the red key on the front panel. Alternatively, you can also activate this service by doing a battery pull hard reboot and setting the phone and battery down side by side. The OFF function will remain activated until you reinsert the battery in the morning or after your nap. I believe that most mobile phones come with this feature, although the location and color of the button may vary by manufacturer and model.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
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.
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> How can there be any ambiguity about this? Either it's 4th Generation, or it's not.
Er, no it's not, In Sprint's universe, at least (where international standards in general, and GSM in particular, are largely irrelevant), WiMax IS unambiguously their fourth major leap forward, and arguably their fourth major modulation change.
0G: prehistoric insofar as SprintPCS goes (Sprint Spectrum existed, but it was a totally unrelated company owned by Sprint that ended up being sold off and eventually agglomerating into the company that's now T-Mobile)
1G: IS95 -- CDMA voice with 9.6kbit/sec circuit-switched data
2G: CDMA2000 voice with 1xRTT data. Data is now adhoc, but still uses the same fundamental modulation scheme as voice. You can have one or the other, but not both at the same time. ~80-160kbit/sec real-world data speeds.
3G: CDMA2000 voice with EVDO data. Unlike 1xRTT, EVDO has a fundamentally different air interface. It's basically CDMA2000 overlaid onto time-division multiplexing. Real-world data speeds in the neighborhood of 250-600kbit/sec.
4G: CDMA 2000 voice with WiMax data. Utterly, totally, and completely different air interface ("radio"), with real-world data speeds in the neighborhood of 1-6mbit/sec (theoretically seen as high as 10mbit down and 1.2mbit up, with the main limit being Sprint/Clear's Tier-1 connectivity to the rest of the internet itself). 4G also adds another important new capability to Sprintland -- simultaneous voice and data.
The same argument can be made for Verizon, substituting "LTE" for "WiMax" in 4G. The truth is, there's nothing holy about Verizon's LTE. The Pope, Obama, Oprah, Justin Timberlake, Steve Jobs, and Lady Gaga could all personally bless its LTE'ness, and it still won't change the almost nonexistent likelihood that a nominally-LTE phone from AT&T (or Europe) will be able to successfully make use of it in any meaningful way. In real terms, Sprint/Clear WiMax and Verizon LTE are basically the K56flex and X2 of 4G wireless. Neither one is likely to go away soon (in the US, at least), because neither one really has any REASON to go away... they can both share the same spectrum (no need to set aside one chunk for LTE, and another separate chunk for WiMax), and making a radio at the tower end that can deal with both isn't a huge problem, because they differ mainly with respect to what happens AFTER you've decoded them to a a raw bitstream.
If anyone's being dishonest, it's T-Mobile. In the case of Verizon and Sprint, the ITU's official definition of "4G" is about as directly relevant to real-world networks as the OSI network model (it looks nice on paper, but it's basically impossible to cleanly map it to reality without putting dozens of asterisks and footnotes qualifying judgment calls about how to classify things). On the other hand, in the "GSM" universe, it could be argued that the ITU's definition has a much, much stronger and more clearly-defined meaning, partly because the ITU's own model is largely based on the way "GSM" works.
Then again, T-Mobile's innocence or guilt is a toss-up anyway. Where it works, it's almost as fast as Sprint's WiMax. However, Sprint's WiMax gives its customers 2-6mbit data speeds today in neighborhoods where T-Mobile customers are lucky to have viable EDGE -- even in cities that are alleged by T-Mobile to be solidly "4G". So, I'll give T-Mobile one point for being practically equivalent to Sprint anyway, then beat them up and kick them a little for wildly exaggerating their urban "4G" coverage area. In the 'burbs, it's not even a fair comparison... Sprint wins, hands down.
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