5 ms·

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

40 points by devy 8y ago

sp332 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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!"
  - sp332 8y ago
    Didn't they fail to get a trademark or something? I think they would only license the "3G" label to services that met their standards, but they couldn't enforce anything for 4G.
    - amyjess 8y ago
      Yeah, the ITU never owned the 4G name. In technical circles, 4G was used as a synonym for the IMT-Advanced spec, but that was just common courtesy. And then post-HSPA technologies like HSPA+, Mobile WiMAX, and LTE showed up, and every carrier that implemented them called them 4G, and the ITU couldn't do anything. Eventually they published a nothingburger of a press release saying that they don't care anymore and as far as they're concerned, anything the carriers are calling 4G is 4G.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    Ok, I'm not sure what it is, but when I got my first LTE device (iPhone5) it was so much faster than my 4S that I simply couldn't believe it. Of course, I had recently switched from ATT to Tmobile, so I'm not sure whether AT&T's HSPA+ was on paper speed equivalent to TMobile's LTE, but the difference in experience was amazing (it could also have been the fact that TMO had planned additional capacity before everyone joined - AT&T was crowded/oversubscribed for sure - or maybe the iPhone4S modem was just slower in general than the iPhone5).
    - amyjess 8y ago
      AT&T's HSPA+ was pretty bad, even in comparison to T-Mobile's HSPA+. Even if you were in a place that got no LTE signal, you'd get better performance on T-Mobile than AT&T. AT&T was stuck on 21 Mbps vanilla HSPA+, while T-Mobile rolled out 42 Mbps DC-HSPA+ in 2011 (with a surprise midnight announcement that they'd already converted a huge chunk of their network and just turned it on). DC-HSPA+ had real-world performance better than or equal to AT&T and Verizon's LTE networks at the time, which were allegedly 100 Mbps but didn't perform like it, so I honestly don't blame T-Mobile for marketing it as being equal to Verizon's network. For context, this was back when AT&T was trying to buy T-Mobile, and the reason why T-Mobile was enthusiastic about it was because they were out of spectrum and didn't have any room to roll out LTE. So instead they went all-out in making their HSPA+ network as fantastic as possible until they could get bought by somebody with spectrum (i.e. AT&T). Rolling out DC-HSPA+ ahead of schedule was just the start; they had plans to follow that up with MIMO bringing speeds up to 84 Mbps. But then government interference caused the deal to fall through, which triggered a trap clause that forced AT&T to cede a decent chunk of spectrum to T-Mobile, so they scrapped their MIMO plans and rolled out LTE on their newly-acquired spectrum. And they very much had an incentive to make their LTE network fantastic, because they needed it to perform better than their DC-HSPA+ network to be worth it for people to buy new phones. Being newer than AT&T's and Verizon's LTE networks (and maybe Sprint's, but I can't remember if Sprint switched to LTE before or after this) probably helped them, as they got to start it out with all-new hardware.
  - staticfish 8y ago
    One thing that people forget: "LTE" stands for "Long-Term Evolution". It was built in to the name that the technology and stack is what we would consider a draft.
- mikestew 8y ago
  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.
  - amyjess 8y ago
    At that time, literally every single national carrier in the US had a technology they marketed as "4G" that didn't meet the IMT-Advanced standards. AT&T and T-Mobile both marketed HSPA+ as 4G. IIRC, T-Mobile did it first, and AT&T followed suit. It wasn't just a US thing either, because Canadian carriers also followed our lead and did the same thing. Sprint marketed WiMax as 4G. They were the first to market anything as 4G in the US. Verizon marketed the original version of LTE as 4G. While LTE-Advanced meets the IMT-Advanced spec, original LTE doesn't. And then as Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile all rolled out their LTE networks, they marketed them as "4G LTE" even though they too were using original LTE and not LTE-Advanced.
    - sli 8y ago
      I remember using older custom ROMs on my Android devices that would differentiate between HSPA+ and 4G in the status bar. That was a really nice feature, but my current ROM on my current phone doesn't do it.
- DrScump 8y ago
  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.
  - sp332 8y ago
    No, I was just complaining about AT&T (although maybe T-Mobile did the same). I had an EVO 4G, that thing was blinding fast whenever I got a WiMax signal.
    - DrScump 8y ago
      I had an EVO 4G Me, too! It was my last Sprint phone.
xutopia 8y ago
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.
calebh 8y ago
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 8y ago
  > 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/ https://fi.google.com/about/plan/
  - Glyptodon 8y ago
    My only gripe with Fi is that if you use Google Voice you end up having to give up your extra number. (I love having more than one phone number.)
    - mclehman 8y ago
      I got around that by just making another google account specifically for my old cell number turned voice number. I really wanted a 505 area code but knew I'd inevitably miss a site for which I'd need to update the 2FA number, so I just grabbed <my phone number>@gmail.com and ported the number. It's also been helpful given how many people absolutely refuse to stop calling my old number despite explicitly telling the resistant ones "I have a new number, I _will_ stop checking the old one, and I can't answer calls to it anyway".
  - calebh 8y ago
    Ah I was thinking that they would throttle you to ridiculously slow speeds if you went over the limit. It looks like the throttling doesn't kick in until 15 GB, which is pretty good.
zitterbewegung 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
bitwize 8y ago
Reminds me of Sprint's short-lived "4G" network which was really WiMAX (and usually didn't work for shit, especially inside buildings).
- gregdunn 8y ago
  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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
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.

40 points by devy 8y ago

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 8y ago
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!"
- sp332 8y ago
  Didn't they fail to get a trademark or something? I think they would only license the "3G" label to services that met their standards, but they couldn't enforce anything for 4G.
  - amyjess 8y ago
    Yeah, the ITU never owned the 4G name. In technical circles, 4G was used as a synonym for the IMT-Advanced spec, but that was just common courtesy. And then post-HSPA technologies like HSPA+, Mobile WiMAX, and LTE showed up, and every carrier that implemented them called them 4G, and the ITU couldn't do anything. Eventually they published a nothingburger of a press release saying that they don't care anymore and as far as they're concerned, anything the carriers are calling 4G is 4G.
- r00fus 8y ago
  Ok, I'm not sure what it is, but when I got my first LTE device (iPhone5) it was so much faster than my 4S that I simply couldn't believe it. Of course, I had recently switched from ATT to Tmobile, so I'm not sure whether AT&T's HSPA+ was on paper speed equivalent to TMobile's LTE, but the difference in experience was amazing (it could also have been the fact that TMO had planned additional capacity before everyone joined - AT&T was crowded/oversubscribed for sure - or maybe the iPhone4S modem was just slower in general than the iPhone5).
  - amyjess 8y ago
    AT&T's HSPA+ was pretty bad, even in comparison to T-Mobile's HSPA+. Even if you were in a place that got no LTE signal, you'd get better performance on T-Mobile than AT&T. AT&T was stuck on 21 Mbps vanilla HSPA+, while T-Mobile rolled out 42 Mbps DC-HSPA+ in 2011 (with a surprise midnight announcement that they'd already converted a huge chunk of their network and just turned it on). DC-HSPA+ had real-world performance better than or equal to AT&T and Verizon's LTE networks at the time, which were allegedly 100 Mbps but didn't perform like it, so I honestly don't blame T-Mobile for marketing it as being equal to Verizon's network. For context, this was back when AT&T was trying to buy T-Mobile, and the reason why T-Mobile was enthusiastic about it was because they were out of spectrum and didn't have any room to roll out LTE. So instead they went all-out in making their HSPA+ network as fantastic as possible until they could get bought by somebody with spectrum (i.e. AT&T). Rolling out DC-HSPA+ ahead of schedule was just the start; they had plans to follow that up with MIMO bringing speeds up to 84 Mbps. But then government interference caused the deal to fall through, which triggered a trap clause that forced AT&T to cede a decent chunk of spectrum to T-Mobile, so they scrapped their MIMO plans and rolled out LTE on their newly-acquired spectrum. And they very much had an incentive to make their LTE network fantastic, because they needed it to perform better than their DC-HSPA+ network to be worth it for people to buy new phones. Being newer than AT&T's and Verizon's LTE networks (and maybe Sprint's, but I can't remember if Sprint switched to LTE before or after this) probably helped them, as they got to start it out with all-new hardware.
- staticfish 8y ago
  One thing that people forget: "LTE" stands for "Long-Term Evolution". It was built in to the name that the technology and stack is what we would consider a draft.
mikestew 8y ago
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.
- amyjess 8y ago
  At that time, literally every single national carrier in the US had a technology they marketed as "4G" that didn't meet the IMT-Advanced standards. AT&T and T-Mobile both marketed HSPA+ as 4G. IIRC, T-Mobile did it first, and AT&T followed suit. It wasn't just a US thing either, because Canadian carriers also followed our lead and did the same thing. Sprint marketed WiMax as 4G. They were the first to market anything as 4G in the US. Verizon marketed the original version of LTE as 4G. While LTE-Advanced meets the IMT-Advanced spec, original LTE doesn't. And then as Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile all rolled out their LTE networks, they marketed them as "4G LTE" even though they too were using original LTE and not LTE-Advanced.
  - sli 8y ago
    I remember using older custom ROMs on my Android devices that would differentiate between HSPA+ and 4G in the status bar. That was a really nice feature, but my current ROM on my current phone doesn't do it.
DrScump 8y ago
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.
- sp332 8y ago
  No, I was just complaining about AT&T (although maybe T-Mobile did the same). I had an EVO 4G, that thing was blinding fast whenever I got a WiMax signal.
  - DrScump 8y ago
    I had an EVO 4G Me, too! It was my last Sprint phone.

xutopia 8y ago

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.

calebh 8y ago

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 8y ago
> 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/ https://fi.google.com/about/plan/
- Glyptodon 8y ago
  My only gripe with Fi is that if you use Google Voice you end up having to give up your extra number. (I love having more than one phone number.)
  - mclehman 8y ago
    I got around that by just making another google account specifically for my old cell number turned voice number. I really wanted a 505 area code but knew I'd inevitably miss a site for which I'd need to update the 2FA number, so I just grabbed <my phone number>@gmail.com and ported the number. It's also been helpful given how many people absolutely refuse to stop calling my old number despite explicitly telling the resistant ones "I have a new number, I _will_ stop checking the old one, and I can't answer calls to it anyway".
- calebh 8y ago
  Ah I was thinking that they would throttle you to ridiculously slow speeds if you went over the limit. It looks like the throttling doesn't kick in until 15 GB, which is pretty good.

zitterbewegung 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

bitwize 8y ago

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

gregdunn 8y ago
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 8y ago
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 8y ago

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.