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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.
technology priced and tagged as today's advanced technology.
;)
Just my 2 cents
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
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 :|