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.

Comments

Re:Is this worth the inevitable class action lawsu

[schnell]

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.

Isn't "nG" originally just a marketing term.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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".

Re:did AT&T actually HAVE HSPA+?

[_merlin]

Bullshit:

• W-CDMA/HSPA/HSPA+ all require linear power amplifiers on the handset. This runs down battery rapidly and causes the handset to heat up. LTE intentionally uses SC-FDMA on the uplink so the handset doesn't need linear amplification, and can run cooler with far better battery life. The GMSK scheme used by GSM before EDGE had similar benefits, which is why GSM handsets got such good battery life.
• HSPA+ was deployed on lower-frequency bands in places other than the US (e.g. 850MHz and 900MHz in Australia), and it still suffered from the same problems, because they're inherent. Better RF propagation doesn't magically change the requirements of the modulation scheme.
• LTE has better spectral efficiency than W-CDMA/HSPA(+) and doesn't suffer as badly from the "buried node" problem where a handset close to the base station swamps the signal from a distant handset that can still receive the signal from the base station. This problem is inherent to CDMA systems - there's no getting around it. This means that in a sparsely-populated area, you're more likely to be able to make use of marginal signal when other users are close to the base.
• Dynamically dividing CDMA code space to manage multiple handsets' bandwidth demands is computationally expensive and difficult to optimise. You'll always be wasting more code space than you need for some handset, wasting bandwidth on the channel. This is inherent to CDMA and gets worse as channels get wider and code spaces get bigger (i.e. it's a lot worse on 5MHz W-CDMA channels than 1.25MHz cdmaOne channels). It's a lot easier to optimally assign bandwidth with LTE's OFDMA on the downlink. This combines with the previous point to allow LTE to make much better use of the same amount of spectrum.
• "Soft handover" where a handset associates with multiple base stations is not PPP multi-link. It doesn't split the data between them - it consumes the same amount of code space on all of them but doesn't multiply the available bandwidth. It provides benefits in situations where you can get marginal signal from multiple base stations, but it's very wasteful. The networks try to stop handsets from staying in soft handover any longer than absolutely necessary to minimise wasted spectrum.
• IP address changes aren't an issue with the network technology itself - software-defined networking techniques allow a handset to maintain its IP address as it's handed over from cell to cell. If the US carriers can't get this right, they need to learn to do networking properly.
• Circuit-switched modes are inefficient compared to packet-switched modes. Cellular radio technology has improved to the point where packet-switched mode is good enough for voice and video calls. It's been deployed for years on 3G networks (typically branded "Next-G" - e.g. Telstra in Australia and 1010 in Hong Kong), and LTE always does packet-switched voice calls. It makes things simpler on the carrier's network as well if they don't need to support circuit-switched modes for voice/video in addition to packet-switched modes for mobile data. This has been on the roadmap for years - it was always part of the plan for cdma2000 to switch to packet-switched voice as well, but it died before that happened.

You sound like a Qualcomm shill trying to badmouth the superior technology that won out in the end.