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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.
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.
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