What's in a mobile name?
Several trade press stories have run advocating accurate use of the term “4G.” It’s an apropos time for these articles to be appearing, because in late October, the International Telecommunications Union-Radiocommunication Sector identified two mobile wireless broadband technologies as official, standard 4G technologies going forward.
Several trade press stories have run advocating accurate use of the term “4G.”
It’s an apropos time for these articles to be appearing, because in late October, the International Telecommunications Union-Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) identified two mobile wireless broadband technologies as official, standard 4G technologies going forward.
Verizon steals Clearwire’s 4G thunder
Those technologies, as expected, are LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced. WirelessMAN-Advanced defines networks based on the IEEE’s forthcoming 802.16m standard, a next-generation WiMAX network that the WiMAX Forum refers to as WiMAX Release 2.
(Confused yet? Read on.)
The ITU-R’s formal name for 4G is International Mobile Telecommunications (IMT)-Advanced. Among the specifications for 4G/IMT-Advanced are 1Gbps stationary reception speeds and 100Mbps mobile speeds.
None of the so-called “4G” technologies out there today or poised for deployment meet the criteria. Rather, IMT-Advanced (4G) is expected to be deployed starting in the 2012 to 2013 time frame.
With these mouthfuls of acronyms, however, is it any wonder there’s a tendency to use “4G” shorthand? In fact, the U.S. mobile operators all refer to their commercial or imminent IP-based WiMAX or Long Term Evolution (LTE) services as “4G” services. Is this false advertising or just simplified marketing intended to keep us all from losing our minds?
Well, as I noted in this newsletter in February, it’s up to the consumer to know that there’s a marketing use of the term and a technical use of the term.
We went through the same thing with 3G, including annoying ad campaigns starring Luke Wilson. This issue has reared its head again, as T-Mobile has been ribbing AT&T in commercials, calling its own HSPA+ network a 4G network — in fact, calling it the largest 4G network, which AT&T refutes.
This is another one of those issues that the FCC might one day want to roll into its rule-making about fair consumer disclosure and protections. Alternatively, some entity could trademark “4G.” A brief search on my part indicates that, in the telecommunications sector, nobody owns it.
In the meantime, take “4G” with a grain of salt. Not all 4Gs are created equal.
