During AT&T Wireless' recent Universal Mobile Telecommunications Service launch, Chairman and CEO John Zeglis repeatedly called the offering the first "true" 3G service in the U.S. 

This was a jab at Sprint and Verizon Wireless. These carriers have loosely used the "3G" terminology to describe their own Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)-based mobile services, some of which, while faster than AT&T's, are not technically "3G."

But the ITU describes 3G services, based on UMTS technology, as such: Peak vehicular speeds of 144M bit/sec, 384K bit/sec speeds when walking and 2M bit/sec speeds when stable.  And AT&T Wireless didn't say anything about getting into the megabit-per-second speed range.

It would be a really good idea if vendors and carriers would try to use official networking terminology - wireless and otherwise - properly. There was a reason that certain words and phrases entered the telecommunications and data communications lexicon. It was intended to give everyone a common framework for communicating technical concepts and functions. 

I understand the need for marketing, but part of marketing's job in the technology industry is to educate. If we use what were intended as "absolute" technical terms loosely as marketing terms, in whatever context we choose, we do ourselves disservice by confusing the market. I myself am likely propagating some of this miscomprehension as I, too, become "educated" by the industry and pass along these misnomers.

For example, take the term "broadband." At one time, this term meant "above 1.5M bit/sec." Or so I thought. People now seem to be using it to simply mean "faster than what we had before." Even Zeglis used the term to refer to AT&T Wireless' UMTS service, which is substantially slower than even half a megabit per second.

I just checked "Newton's Telecom Dictionary." I would defer to industry veteran and icon Harry Newton any day of the week. And I seem to stand corrected. According to Newton, "broadband" actually means "a transmission facility providing bandwidth greater than 45M bit/sec." The "greater than 1.5M bit/sec" definition is actually reflected by the term "wideband."

"Narrowband" is the term for "less than 1.5M bit/sec" - which would seem to cover just about everything we have going commercially on any scale in the wireless WAN right now.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.