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AT&T Will Put a Fake 5G Logo On Its 4G LTE Phones (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: AT&T customers will start to see a 5G logo appear in the corner of their smartphone next year -- not because they're using a 5G phone connected to a 5G network, but because AT&T is going to start pretending its most advanced 4G LTE tech is 5G. According to FierceWireless, AT&T will display an icon reading "5G E" on newer phones that are connected to LTE in markets where the carrier has deployed a handful of speed boosting -- but still definitively 4G -- technologies. The "E," displayed smaller than the rest of the logo, refers to "5G Evolution," the carrier's term for networks that aren't quite 5G but are still faster than traditional LTE. AT&T pulled the same stunt during the transition to LTE. "The company rolled out a speed-boosting 3G tech called HSPA+, then got all of its phone partners -- even Apple -- to show a '4G' logo when on that kind of connection," reports The Verge.
I think we all know now what AT&T is capable of. Don't we?
The "E," displayed smaller than the rest of the logo, refers to "5G Evolution," ...
I think it actually means "Eventually" - kind of like how "Forever" in "Duke Nukem Forever" actually meant the release schedule.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
technology priced and tagged as today's advanced technology.
;)
Just my 2 cents
Then again with recent laws regarding EULAs and arbitration (which have been upheld by the Supreme Court on the grounds that, well, it's a law) I'm not sure you can sue for this kind of thing anymore.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Seriously you don't get to claim that your 4G phones are 5G just because it's "faster" than regular 4G. It should be 4G E.
ventually
See really special and new cell phone infrastructure when walking out of your front door and driving around your village? Thats 5G.
Cell phone infrastructure that is for your entire village is 4G.
Distance and new investment is the tell.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
What are you gonna do about it? We got our guy in in the FCC and White House. Kick rocks and pay your bill.
I'm not sure you can sue for this kind of thing anymore.
The trick would likely be proving the the average consumer thinks the 5G has a specific meaning that AT&T isn't providing. Given that 3G/4G/5G are really marketing terms, not technical terms, I'd guess they'll probably get away with this.
This phone is 5G ready!
5G before it arrives but pnly if you cN wack the wompu...
This comment is paywalled and requures a Slaahdot GOLD account to read the rremainder.
you silly people who continue to insist that the world didn't end in 2012 as scientifically predicted by timewave 0 never fail to amuse me.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2011...
Oh yeah, AT&T? Well, I'm going to put a "Type R" sticker on my phone, making your phones all seem slow and lame by comparison.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Lawsuits over something like this seem unlikely, given how all this started several years ago and the lack of suits then.
You may recall that in 2012-ish "4G" was all the rage. Sprint looked at its dumpster fire of a network roadmap and decided that, because it was nowhere near a LTE rollout, it had to stay in the marketing game. So it squinted at the 3GPP "4G standard" and said "since it specifies 10 Mbps speed, and our WiMax network could get 10 Mbps on a clear day if you squint at it right, we will now say we have the first '4G' network!" T-Mobile felt the need to respond, so they looked at their HSPA+ network and said, "well if Sprint's WiMax network counts as '4G' by that standard, then our network is 4G too." AT&T sadly succumbed to the peer pressure and branded HSPA+ as 4G as well, which was especially unfortunate given that they actually had a "real 4G" LTE rollout on the horizon (they were second after Verizon in the US).
Nobody ever successfully sued Sprint, T-Mobile or AT&T over any of those shenanigans, so I doubt there will be much more luck this time around.
"95% of all Slashdot
I knew they would do this shit.
5g my hairy ass. The proper 5g everyone has been talking about isn't feasible with current tech, it's a horrible mess years away from proper deployment. I don't think anyone even has proper real-world tests running for it yet.
This just proves it. Their shitty 5g is just going to be boosted 4g.
I was under the impression that
- "nG" was originally just an arbitrary marketing term, approximating "Our company's Nth generation of equipment, better than our (n-1)G service".
- As of 5G there IS a regulatory mandate from the ITU, but it's just for a set of minimal performance metrics, not a particular way to achieve them.
- So "5G" is not a STANDARD, but applies to a NUMBER of standards by which the which a carrier may chose to meet the required performance level. In particular;
--it does NOT guarantee interoperability with another carrier's "5G" branded offering
--If a carrier can achieve the required performance by appropriately configuring their 4G equipment (such as LTE and/or WiMax boxen) and the number of subscribers served by them, they are free to call it "5G".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Its not the first time AT&T has done this, look back when 4g was new, they claimed their network was 4g when it was really 3g+ speed boosting techniques. They had no problem in ever commercial claiming their network was 4g though.
The class could be non-current ATT customers that are considering ATT.
LTE had a switch to an IP based network, and an increase to speeds over 100 megabits per second. 5G is even faster, but LTE seems good enough. Why undersell LTE?
Personally, I was pissed when T-Mobile decided to go "all LTE" just for the sake of a marketing bullet point. HSPA+ might not be LTE, but in urban areas with dense tower deployment, HSPA+ is technically SUPERIOR to LTE (at least, LTE at the time it was deployed to replace HSPA+), especially if you're in a moving vehicle.
Unlike LTE, HSPA+ allows your phone to connect to MULTIPLE different towers & split your data between them (basically, like using a shotgun modem with PPP multilink). That comes in handy if you're in an area with dense tower deployment and in a fast-moving vehicle (like high-speed rail, or a car doing 80mph on a freeway) -- the phone can metaphorically swing like a monkey from tower/branch to tower/branch, always keeping one metaphorical hand on a tower/branch while the other reaches for the next so it's never COMPLETELY offline and disconnected. In contrast, LTE has "hard" disconnects -- the phone connects to exactly one tower at a time, and when it disconnects it has no data connectivity (or IP address) AT ALL until it establishes its next connection to a different tower.
This also means that HSPA+ can be a lot more aggressive about hunting for better connectivity... it can hedge its bets by remaining connected to its "best" known tower, while aggressively connecting around in search of a better one. In contrast, LTE tends to hang on until it literally can't sustain a connection at all, even if there's a "better" tower it COULD use instead... in order to "try out" that tower, it has to break its connection and do a hard switch to the new one... and if it's TOO aggressive about hunting for a better tower, you can end up with the kind of thrashing Sprint phones had back in the wimax era (if you were in an area where two wimax towers were in view, but BOTH were marginal, Sprint phones would thrash back and forth between them every few seconds... made worse by the fact that those phones ALSO shared components between wimax and wifi, so you couldn't use both simultaneously.)
In rural areas (and large parts of suburbia), it's kind of academic because there's probably only one tower in view at a time ANYWAY... but in areas with the tower density to support it properly, HSPA+ is arguably a step UP from LTE.
That said... I don't think AT&T ever actually HAD HSPA+. I know AT&T had HSDPA, and I'm pretty sure they were in the process of deploying HSUPA at some point, but AFAIK, AT&T quit upgrading 3G at some point before HSPA+ and decided to focus entirely on LTE... then started attacking T-Mobile for not being "all LTE".
Personally, if I'd been in charge at T-Mobile, I would have hit back hard at AT&T and run ads calling them "LTE Lemmings" for blindly chasing after buzzwords instead of pure technical merit. I would have shown happy T-Mobile customers on Acela (or in cars driving side by side on an open freeway) enjoying uninterrupted connectivity while frustrated AT&T and Verizon customers kept having their Facetime chats glitch and break up every couple of minutes when the phones moved too far from their past tower & had a second or two of network disruption while connecting to the next tower. Or worse, having their banking and VPN apps kicking them offline every few minutes because it detected an IP address change (go search old messages at XDA-developers.com & you can read about how people used to have to lock their phone to 3G to use it with a VPN or banking app when riding on Acela, because otherwise the IP address would keep changing every few minutes & they'd get logged out automatically).
IMHO, LTE was actually a technological step backwards. Most of the "benefits" people ascribe to "LTE" over HSPA+ have nothing to do with "4G", and EVERYTHING to do with "carriers used their best new frequency bands to deploy it". Had HSPA+ been deployed at 600 & 700MHz, with the same amount of fiber backhaul as LTE, the difference between HSPA+ and LTE would have been mostly an academic footnote. LTE does make some improvements to the way voi
As if 4G meant something. What's so hard on calling the technology or the speed in Mbps?
I was under the impression that - "nG" was originally just an arbitrary marketing term, approximating "Our company's Nth generation of equipment, better than our (n-1)G service".
Correct. The nG is, conveniently, comparable to WiFi versions and names. Unsurprisingly, after 3G became well known, it was decided that since a year or so had gone by, 4G needed to come into existence. This is closely related to marketing, of course.. So, because mobile phone "G" wasn't something that was integrated into mobile phone towers annually like the next year of fashion, carriers decided to use a 4, then some used the acronym LTE, etc.
When a large number of antennas are upgraded, that must also include testing and adjusting settings due to differing land (and buliding) structure, altitude, composition, and weather in unique areas, across the country. Design and testing for this of course can't be done annually.
"nG", and other things involving mobile phones, are not technical/proper versions. Go to a phone store and ask a technical question; you'll receive a marketed response.
When you keep lying to us.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The US government didn't complain about false labeling previously, they won't complain about it this time, particularly when '5G' is an incomplete standard. (ie. Your '5G' implementation doesn't have to work with my '5G' implementation.)
Hate thrm almost as much as lawyers.
My Atrix 4G was actually 3G+, maybe effectively HSPA. Also on AT&T
if there is any truth left in anything.
It seems everything claimed these days comes with a side of lies and / or deception.
Sometimes the lies are exposed quickly, others years later but, it seems damn near everything is ( at least partially ) a lie :|
FUuuuuUUUUUuuuKKKK AT&T! Already had a dozen reasons to despise that shitcompany... now I've got another. They're full of shit! Fuck AT&T for ever and ever and ever. Fuck AT&T forever.
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Boycott them, in the meantime.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
There's one remaining safety... the FTC itself still has the power to sue any company on behalf of customers over violations of the FTC Act and bring them to court over false advertising, etc.
Regardless of any arbitration clauses or class-actino waivers.
It won't work. Real 5G phones are easy to spot. They're thicker, heavier, and the battery won't last a day.
Kriston
Sprint sucked, but WiMax WAS "4G", every bit as much as American LTE was "4G".
The main reason why Sprint's Wimax was inferior to Verizon's first stab at LTE was because of the frequency band it ran in. The latest iteration of LTE is better than Wimax was, but the FIRST generation of LTE was barely any different (in terms of bare-metal radio modulation) than Wimax (slightly more efficient encoding to make better use of RF energy, but it was more of a minor tweak than anything). If Sprint's Wimax had run at 700MHz instead of 3.5GHz, it would have been functionally no different from Verizon's first-generation LTE.
Sprint made their transition to LTE a thousand times worse than it had to be by allowing/requiring Samsung to make the Galaxy S3 LTE-only, instead of spending $5 more and building it with the pin-identical chip that could do Wimax too. If the S3 had been dual-mode (even if it required rebooting to switch between Wimax or LTE), it would have bought Sprint another year to gracefully transition... they could have left Wimax where it was, deployed LTE to markets with no Wimax, then switched Wimax to LTE after they'd given customers a year or two of dual-mode phones that could do either one.
Instead, Sprint ended up in a situation where their Wimax network became nearly useless almost overnight as (former) customers upgraded to new LTE-only phones, then returned them and left Sprint in disgust after realizing just HOW BAD Sprint's 3G network had become without having Wimax as a crutch to fall back on.
For what? Idiots whining and crying about "fake" 5G? Well guess what? All phones labelled as 4G are just as "fake". LTE is not technically 4G.
Well there are some pretty distinct generations, which each had different driving goals and had incompatible radio layers.
1G: analog mobile phones.
2G: digital mobile phones, primerally voice but with some data services.
3G: packet data as a design driver but circuit-switched services still a major part of the offerting.
4G: everything is packet data, voice and text are services that run on top of (high-priority) data service.
5G: move to higher frequency shorter distance radio to massively increase data capacity.
In between the major generations there were incremental improvements GSM got packet data services bolted on (intially the only data service was circuit-switched and very slow) and then they got the data rates of that service cranked up. 3G got HSPA and HSPA+ which cranked up the data rates a bit. In the USA it seems these often got marketed as being the generation after the one they really belonged to.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Taking lessons from WindBourne.
Calling it 'fake' implies a connection between a logo on your phone and the type of service you're getting. There is no such connection.
Lawyers! Listen up! AT&T just threw you a nice fat fraud suit hook! Go get'em!