AT&T Unveils a Fake 5G Network Hoping You'll Ignore T-Mobile Is Kicking Its Ass

[zitterbewegung]

When I worked at Alcatel-Lucent as an intern you learn that 1G,2G,3G,4G,5G are all marketing terms.

What you want to pay attention to is the actual underlying technology and see if they are "Rebadging" or not. They use these terms to confuse people who buy phones. Similar to how NVIDIA, AMD and Intel will use new "chips" when they are rebadges. All of these companies have the same management systems in the same systems by Alcatel Lucent its just the big players can actually differentiate themselves a bit. Google Fi and others are MVMOs which basically buy excess network capacity and package it.

[crunchatized]

They're still real technical terms for describing underlying technology that have been appropriated as increasingly stretched marketing terms.

It's almost like the euphemism treadmill. As laypeople hear the technical terms repeatedly in the news and associate it with meaning 'this is Good New Thing,' marketing departments will notice and slap them onto more and more stuff until the term loses its original value. Rinse, repeat.

[calebh]

Now that we have super fast mobile internet, can we please stop charging absurd data costs? I have Google Fi, and they still charge $10/GB. I could consume that much data within a couple minutes on a cellular network. Sometimes I worry about accidentally using up all my bandwidth when I press the wrong button on an app.

[chimeracoder]

> I have Google Fi, and they still charge $10/GB. I could consume that much data within a couple minutes on a cellular network

Project Fi caps data bills at $60/month: https://fi.google.com/about/plan/

[sp332]

This is exactly what they did with 4G. For a while, if you saw that you had a 4G logo on your status bar, you knew you had 3G, but if you saw LTE, then you had real 4G. The only time you had 4G was when it didn't say 4G!

[amyjess]

Eh, original LTE technically wasn't 4G either. Only LTE-Advanced meets the original definition of 4G. And honestly the early implementations of LTE weren't any faster than HSPA+ either in real-world speeds.

And I have to say "original definition", because the ITU eventually threw up its hands and said "fine, whatever y'all are calling 4G is 4G now!"

[mikestew]

It was one of the contributing factors in getting me to switch from AT&T to T-Mobile. It certainly was not a deal-breaker in light of wanting $35 every time I bought a new phone, or data caps, and all the other hassles. But it did grate on me every time I looked at that status, knowing AT&T was lying to me, and carried some weight at re-up time.

[DrScump]

Not the case with all carriers. Sprint's original "4G" implementation was WiMax and was pretty darn fast for its time. The "4G" status icon meant WiMax then.

[bitwize]

Reminds me of Sprint's short-lived "4G" network which was really WiMAX (and usually didn't work for shit, especially inside buildings).

[gregdunn]

Pretty different. WiMax was a legitimate competitor for the 4G standard and was significantly different than 3G and 3.5G networks (Like the HSDPA stuff that some carriers tried to call 4G)

[DrScump]

WiMax worked well for me, and I lived in an often-unserved valley. My WiMax would be consistently fast even though voice was marginal in my house.

[IronWolve]

With t-mobiles new 600MHz Band 71 has made rural area coverage much nicer. I finally get connection at my folks place, which only had Verizon coverage. My LG v30 now gets coverage, which before I had no coverage. Nice to see them expand and grow.

[xutopia]

In my area there is a very popular ISP that calls its service "Fibe" and even say it's powered by Fiberoptics in their material. Except the fiberoptions are only in part of the system and never reach the residences they sell to. Those only have normal DSL.