4G was supposed to achieve 100mbit peaks and I have yet to see speeds even approaching this with 4G LTE. So if somebody is enforcing advertising rules they're doing a shit job...
LTE's initial iterations were actually not considered 4G by definition. Part of the longterm evolution part was that as the components were upgraded they would comply with 4G. I can break 100mbps down in a few places on an iphone SE with only a cat3 modem, but that's pushing the spec's real-world limit for that.
Today these speeds are easily achievable on most networks, it's just unlikely for AT&T due to congestion and their poor network and spectrum planning. It helps to spend money on capex instead of buying up shitty Mexican carriers and DirecTV to stem the flow of fleeing customers.
That was a bit of a mess. Technically, no carrier at the time had a "real" 4G network, according to the ITU- only LTE-Advanced and WiMAX 2 met their definition.
Since the ITU had declared that Sprint's WiMAX network and Verizon's LTE network weren't real 4G, T-Mobile decided that they could call their (just-as-fast-as-early-LTE-networks) HSPA+ network 4G too, and then AT&T was almost forced to follow suit because T-Mobile was advertising how their 4G network was so much bigger than everyone else's.
It should be noted that T-Mobile was the only one set up to deploy DC-HSPA+ at 42mbps peak theoretical. Scratching around 30mbps was around what Verizon could do before congestion set in on band 13. AT&T to the best of my knowledge only had HSPA+ at 21mbps, so it really was way more of a stretch for them to call their network 4G.
So at least, yeah... tmo kinda could have argued it was similar to early '4G' radio technologies on speed alone.
They were 4G by definition because the definition of 4G is the 4th generation, and LTE is *clearly" that, despite what some idiots in the ITU may try and claim.
The 3G/4G/etc labels are descriptive, not prescriptive.
Please don't let a phone company hear you say that, they'll roll the "g" number every year because there's a new generation of firmware. Words should, and do, mean things.
I didn't say they don't mean things. And phone companies are welcome to try and call whatever they like 5G but it doesn't make it true, any more than the ITU trying to claim some technology is or is not 5G. What makes something 5G is that it is a widely adopted technology that is a clear generation ahead of 4G. That's it. It's not complicated.
The requirements for the proposed 4G spec are actually even higher than that -- 100Mbps was for high-mobility clients, whereas low-mobility clients were promised 1Gbps speeds.
page 9 defines high / low mobility as follows: "low mobility covers
pedestrian speed, and high mobility covers high speed on highways or fast trains (60 km/h to
~250 km/h, or more)." (this is roughly 35 to 150 mph)
We are nowhere near those speeds, even on the best networks.
They just set aspirational targets, but don’t define any technology for meeting those targets. ITU jumped from 200 kbps for 3G to 1 gigabit for 4G. That was not a useful definition and the market correctly ignored it. Imagine if we had “3G” wired networking defined as 100 mbps and “4G” wired networking aspirationally defined as 10 gigabit. What would you do when the IEEE (the folks who actually make the technology) release 1G Ethernet. Would you insist on calling it 3.5G wired networking?
“4G” is LTE. It’s 4G because it’s what came after HSDPA/EVDO, not because it meets any particular ITU target.
Without any sort of backing specification, the terminology of 3G vs 4G vs 5G is dumb and meaningless, as we see with AT&T calling their network 5G (E), even though it's no better than what their competitors call 4G.
Also, it's disingenuous to describe the jump as from 200kbps to 1Gbps, since HSDPA offering 14Mbps was already being deployed prior to when this particular ITU standard came out.
To consumers, 5G just means sufficiently faster than 4G to warrant a new number. “5G” presents an odd scenario, because there are parallel lines of evolution from what consumers currently think of as “4G.” LTE Advance Pro continues to evolve LTE, while 5G NR starts over with an incompatible air interface. Until you start using higher frequency spectrum and small cells, performance wise there is a lot of overlap between the two. An LTE Advance Pro network with a lot of spectrum is going to perform better than a 5GNR network without as much spectrum.
The problem here appears to be not that AT&T is departing from the ITU monikers, or using 5G to refer to LTE Advance Pro, but that it’s selling something as “5G” that’s not faster than “4G.”
LTE does achieve up to 100 Mbps on a highway for me in Serbia, and LTE Advanced does up to 150 Mbps while stationary in a crowded city area with a base station far away. However, that is nowhere near 1 Gbps. I don't know any devices getting over 300 Mbps over LTE Advanced (4G+).
They seem to be branding LTE as even better than 4G. My phone has an "LTE" indicator on top most of the time, but it switches to "4G" when I'm in a basement parking garage with lousy reception.
I'm not sure what these terms mean, and the phone/service didn't exactly come with a user manual.
I'm on AT&T (personal phone) and I get 4.5M bits down on LTE. My Verizon LTE (work phone) gets very similar. Both are iPhones and completely up to date.
I could be near enough to the towers that my fillings start to ache and I still can't get any faster.
I get 18mbit down, 4 up on the lowest end pre-paid tmobile plan. But I'm also in the suburbs of large metro areas where the networks are fairly well built out. However, this is one of the reasons I pay full price on my phone and stick to pre paid. Lot's more flexibility to up stakes and move to a different carrier if they start downgrading service.
I'm on prepaid but I'm paying for data consumption I just don't utilize given the abysmal speeds. I have to use a mobile VPN just to achieve decent peering.
Basically to get around this absurd policy I have to switch to another carrier and back over two months. However, I don't plan to switch back once I make the jump.
In the last year I've traveled to a couple states and a few dozen cities and I had garbage speed and latency in all of them. T-Mobile's solution was that I buy a new phone. But the phone achieved 100mbit when I first got my plan.
