There seems to be a few mistakes. First, partially it sounds like a branding problem. It would be interesting to know where/how it happens: is it just an Ameri

There seems to be a few mistakes. First, partially it sounds like a branding problem. It would be interesting to know where/how it happens: is it just an American thing? At least in Europe I've not really heard of anything of the sort. Sure they may rebrand 3G as "High Speed" and 3.5G as "Super high speed" but that's about it. At least they don't change a term they have already been using. I guess here we are also "lucky" that the protocol is displayed much more prominently. Second point I think the comparison with wirelines didn't convince me too much: 3G/4G/whatever are more like DSL/ISDN/Cable. They can't simply advertise the bandwidth, because you actually need to have the right piece of hardware. Imagine if they sold you a "1MB/sec" connection but it didn't work: "Oh, I am sorry dear customer, but you need to have a UMTS phone for that". I'd be really pissed at that point. :) Edit: actually another such case is Flash format. You get SD, SDHC, SDXC, for example. It's important they advertise that because that's what may decide if you can read or not the card you just bought. Then sure, they also advertise that the card is 8GB, 16GB or what have you, but you can't remove the information on the protocol.