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

E, is even more than anyone that you adore

[fahrbot-bot]

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.

So begins the arms race

[Cajun Hell]

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.

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".

did AT&T actually HAVE HSPA+?

[Miamicanes]

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

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.