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How AT&T Totally Flubbed 4G
adeelarshad82 writes "Turns out that AT&T may be lying about 4G. The company's two '4G' phones and its '4G' modem don't deliver 4G even by AT&T's own standards. In fact, test results show that the company is delivering '4G' devices that are actually slower than the carrier's own 3G devices. So how can they get away with this? Well, initially the International Telecommunications Union defined 4G as a bunch of super-fast technologies nobody used yet, but the ITU crumbled under pressure from various cell phone companies and now defines 4G as any cellular Internet network that's faster than what was considered the fastest technology in 2009. Between the revised 4G standards and a little fine print in its ads, AT&T is able to legally indemnify itself against the fact that its current 4G claim is totally worthless. While other carriers also claim that they have 4G networks, Verizon's LTE is the only technology which comes close to real 4G."
I'm sure glad our government doesn't kill innovation by forcing carriers like AT&T to actually deliver on the promises they advertise for their networks. AT&T is free to "innovate" a way to sell the same crap with a shiny new label.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Standards bodies have become nothing but the whore of businesses.
The main problem with standards is that they aren't.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
Even as a marketer, I agree. This is fraud, pure and simple.
It was questionable before there was a published spec, but no longer.
Learn about Photography Basics.
the 3gees are no longer fashionable. 4gees wheres at now. even managed to offer less bandwidth with this "upgrade". AT&T has customer screwing down to a science
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Beauty? fear? death? sleep? anti-magic? disintegration? transformation? levitation? slowness? suffering? Sure.
Now they get WIMAX as well?
This whole "G" stuff has been vague, undefinable nonsense from the beginning, or at least since before anyone outside of the telecom industry had heard the term. The debates about whether EDGE was 2G or 2.5G (as if generations were subject to real/fractional values) was proof enough of this. Calling the 2nd iPhone model the "iPhone 3G" has proven to be a misstep on Apple's part, rather effectively confusing the heck out of its model generations, and forcing them to resort to nonsense like "3Gs" before reverting to something more sensible: an integer indicating which generation of the device it is. How about calling a phone technology by... its name. LTE, CDMA, EDGE, ETC. If you want to make a boast about how fast it is, do it like they used to do with modems: give us an actual numeric speed (e.g. 1200bps, 19.2kbps). Because this xG marketing nonsense is useless... and always has been.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Why can't they just quote what their average download speed is?
What's more, the ICU charges a small fortune for said standards documents.
Part of the blame is on the ICU - the carriers started advertising 4G before the standards came out, forcing the standards to meet the claims. This is no different from how Netscape and Microsoft killed HTML 3.1 when it finally came out and forced the W3C to adopt a nonsensical bunch of crap as a replacement. The fragmentation that followed permitted Microsoft to kill Netscape and caused much of the crap that followed. The W3C will be picking up the pieces for years.
Standards bodies should be flexible but they must ultimately be the law enforcement of all technology and crafts. They are the modern version of the guild hall, the corporations are merely the apprentices within.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In the wired internet landscape, one number matters to this day... bps. When it was about modems, there were some slight variations in speed, but it was all about bps of your modem and the max bps of the carrier. Comcast beat Verizon DSL like a redheaded stepchild with bps until Verizon came out with FIOS, and Verizon returned the favor. They keep exchanging blows as to who is faster, but you can look up clearly on their website and find out which was faster. bps is like MPH, you know what it was and could explain it to someone simply.
However, this 3G/4G crap is just like the Justin Bieber/Ozzy Ozborne commercial. It's rapidly changing, confusing and stupid. The only reason to call something 3G vs 4G is to create new marketing speak. So I say kill the xG tag. Phones should be rated by how fast they can go, period, not by some nebulous xG bullshit. It only serves to confuse the customer and make it seem like it's better even though it's not, and thus give companies a reason to ever increase their prices unnecessarily.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Rubbish. They were too ambitious with their requirements for calling something '4G'. Seriously, 1 Gb/s connections? There was obviously going to be a generation between 10 Mb/s and that. If they had had their way we'd have that 2.75G nonsense all over again.
Basically now 4G = LTE. I'm fine with that -- especially as it is more than a just a speed upgrade, e.g. it has (supposedly) lower latency, and is fully IP-based.
I'm holding out for 6G Bieber Fever.
I'm waiting for 640G. It's all anyone will ever need. ;-)
4Gery
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
We're goin' to 5 G's!!
Only 7 more marketing campaigns until we reach "hexadecimal B"-gees. Complete with "that 70s show" tv commercial tie-ins and a coupon for a free pair of levis bell bottoms and a village people DRMed ringtone download. I can't wait!
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
4G had a definition. 100 Mb/s for high mobility, 1Gb/s for low mobility.
Which were basically impossible goals to reach with current technology.
Enter HSDPA, LTE and EV-DO.
These technologies are significantly faster (or at least can be) than traditional '3G'.
So here's the problem. Are they 3.5G? 3G enhnaced? Are they close enough to 4G to warrant being called that?
The answer is... change the definition of 4G. Because, and lets be realistic here, No one is rolling out True 4G networks, not even close. But they are rollilng out technologies that are 2, 3 (even more) time faster than the current technology. To consumers, doubling performance or tripling it warrants more than 0.5. Which is a problem, because well, 4G actually means something. But once one guy starts using 4G, if you aren't either you fight with them in court, or you start using '4G' and let the definitions be damned and change them.
And when true 4G rolls around, it will itself probably be 3x faster than the current tech.
+1 - The Onion reference
This is the real downfall of society. We have so little care for the truth that we now take as a given that any business offer is a lie.
Good morning you say? What's the catch?
I have a 7G phone. I just took out a sharpie and wrote 7 G's on it. You may now bow to my 7G superiority.
BTW, the volume on my stereo goes to 11.
Now, if you will excuse me I need to return to surfing on my "50meg" hi-speed internet connection.
Proverbs 21:19
The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
It's 1 gb/s FIXED. 100 mbps mobile. That's not hugely far off from WiMax 1 and LTE. And besides, it has much more to do with the modern implementation of new wireless communication techniques than just speed.
Standards are like the Pirate Code, more what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. arrrggg
Well said.
Where I'm from (South Africa) the "What is 4G" question is a hot topic as it is affecting how operators may or may not advertise their networks.
Because of this we actually have an official statement from the ITU which basically states that while they don't necessarily endorse the use of 4G for non IMT-Advanced networks, they acknowledge that networks are going to do (and have done) so.
I also have the GSMA on record saying that they think that LTE will be considered 4G, even though it technically isn't.
Anyway, saying that the ITU "now defines 4G as any cellular Internet network that's faster than what was considered the fastest technology in 2009" is needlessly inaccurate. If anyone in the US would just pick up the phone and call the ITU for clarification on the statement released in December this misunderstanding need not be perpetuated.
I think most whores would take exception to being compared to politicians. I mean, at least SOME whores still have souls.
And if you pay a hooker, you're the only one who gets screwed. Pay a politician, and everybody else gets fucked.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It's also BS actually.
;)
Yes, LTE advance (release 10 of LTE actually, as it's an incremental improvement) has a top Category 8 device that peaks at close to 3 Gbps. Go to www.3gpp.org and fetch TS 36.306, the categories are in section 4.1. Base LTE goes from Cat1 to 5, and LTE-A added Cat 6 to 8.
Now you need to know only one thing: the last category is mostly never implemented. These standards are hugely complex, and competition is fierce. So people get carried away and promise the moon. Then engineers in standardization start the serious work, and see what's possible, and it's not the same. So to be polite, the last category is dimensioned to match the silly promises, and nobody implements it as it is too impractical (unacceptable power consumption to start with, reliance on huge spectrum not available and on too many antennas that wouldn't fit in a handset, just as a few examples).. And the lower are made to be practical.
In basic LTE, the last category 5 was 300 Mbps downlink. What's implemented in practice today is Cat3 at 100 Mbps DL. Maybe some will push to Cat4 (150 Mbps) for bragging rights, but it'll make little difference in the field (we're talking peak rates here, which is only possible on a small part of a cell).
In LTE-A (R10), the last category 8 is ~3 Gbps DL. And the previous practical categories 6 and 7? Well, they're 300 Mbps. Yes you read it well, that's a factor of 10 difference. That should tell you all you need to know about Gps speed.
Today, power is already a challenge with WiMAX, which is 2 Rx chains and 10 MHz. LTE is 2 Rx chains and 20 MHz. LTE-A to meet 1 Gbps would need 70 MHz and 4 Rx chains (for 4x4 MIMO in DL) for example. Nobody has this contiguous spectrum, so that means carrier aggregation, at least 2 bands in practice. So you need 8 Rx chains, which draw power. That's a factor of 4 increase on the RF side. And the baseband is more complex too. All that while the first base (R8) LTE handsets are power challenged.
So please people, get real and use common sense. All this talk of Gpbs speed (even in static) is getting embarrassing. Sure, it's easy to do and perfectly possible on a demo set-up where power and footprint (for all the antennas) are no issue. If you talk real life, it's a different thing.
Besides this, LTE is still a very good standard a significant improvement on what we have. And LTE-A will also be a significant improvement too. But instead of focusing on silly peak rates, go to the 3GPP web site and look at the performance assessment for LTE-A for cell average. You'll find that LTE advanced is expected to be 40 to 60% more efficient in average than LTE. And this is a big gain.
Last point, because we're on Slashdot and we can talk real tech, you need to understand that peak rate doesn't matter much now. Seriously, WWAN faster then WiFi (which is also BS with talk of 600 Mbps, but that's a different story. On portable device it's 20 to 30 Mbps typically)? What matters now is handling the data explosion, and this means improving the network capacity. People always push peak rates as it's more sexy for the average Joe, but that's capacity that matters. Even for you. But it's certainly less sexy and harder to explain.
Still, whenever you hear about higher peak rates, understand that the features underlying the improvement will in practice not be used for higher peak rates, but for increased capacity. Example: MIMO. LTE-A goes up to 8x8 MIMO in Cat8, but that won't be used in mainstream product (and maybe never, as doing a complex chip for a niche market looks very expensive). But you can still have the 8 antennas at the BS, and only 2 at the terminal, and do multi-users MIMO with 4 concurrent users, each using 2 SM MIMO layers. That's really what the standard is made for, and it will increase the network capacity for our benefit.
Thanks for reading so far. I needed the venting on that topic