{"id":654024,"date":"2013-04-23T16:02:05","date_gmt":"2013-04-23T20:02:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=633640"},"modified":"2013-04-23T16:02:05","modified_gmt":"2013-04-23T20:02:05","slug":"5g-doesnt-exist-yet-lets-stop-abusing-the-term","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/654024","title":{"rendered":"5G doesn\u2019t exist yet. Let\u2019s stop abusing the term"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m a bit concerned that we in tech blogging community are doing the mobile industry\u2019s marketing for them. This week a few tech sites published posts that attached the term \u201c5G\u201d<\/a> to T-Mobile\u2019s forthcoming rollout of LTE-Advanced technologies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not my intention here to to attack my peers, but I think it\u2019s necessary to point out we\u2019re descending a slippery slope if we start tossing around the term 5G loosely. 5G doesn\u2019t exist except as the barest concept. It hasn\u2019t been defined by any standards body. The mobile industry only recently began addressing what constitutes 5G, assigning its biggest brains to investigate the technologies that might make up 5G networks<\/a> in the future.<\/p>\n

\"mobile<\/a>I understand the frustration of my fellow tech bloggers. Presented with a bunch of byzantine acronyms, how do you explain to the average reader the differences between an HSPA network and HSPA+ network, or between an LTE and an LTE-Advanced network, in a single sentence? When dealing in headlines of limited length and Twitter posts of 140 characters, it\u2019s easy to fall into the comfortable trap of using terms like 4G and 5G to explain the differences in technologies (I\u2019m guilty of falling into that same trap<\/a> as well).<\/p>\n

But I think we owe it to our readers to spell out those nuances. Otherwise we\u2019re not truly explaining mobile technology. Instead, we\u2019re just repeating the marketing messages of carriers and vendors that have every interest in exaggerating the capabilities of their networks.<\/p>\n

To my knowledge, T-Mobile isn\u2019t publicly labeling its forthcoming network as 5G, but the operator has a reputation for this kind of technology-inflation. In 2010, T-Mobile relabeled its HSPA+ service as 4G<\/a>\u00a0out of the blue. I had some sympathy for T-Mobile at the time, because it was presented with a quandary: Sprint had long used the term 4G to describe its WiMAX network, but T-Mobile\u2019s ostensible 3G network was routinely beating Sprint in raw speed tests.<\/p>\n

Instead of trying to explain the differences to its customers \u2013 which admittedly would have been quite difficult — T-Mobile took the easy way out and simply claimed 4G as its own. Of course, that led AT&T to do the same<\/a> for its even slower 14.4 Mbps HSPA+ network. Eventually, the standards body responsible for defining the various \u2018G\u2019s, the International Telecommunication Union, caved to industry pressure and retroactively defined 4G as pretty much whatever carriers wanted it be<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"ATT-4G-LTE-Logo\"<\/a>4G became a meaningless term, and we tech journalists reinforced its meaninglessness by swallowing the terminology carriers fed us. If carriers gets hooks into the acronym 5G, you can bet the exact same thing will happen. Once one carrier succumbs, others will race to redefine their perfectly serviceable 4G networks as 5G networks. An the next operator to gain the slightest technical edge will start bandying about the term 6G.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not dissing T-Mobile\u2019s technical accomplishments. As I\u2019ve written before, T-Mobile\u2019s new LTE network, by virtue of its newness, has definite advantages over other carriers\u2019 networks<\/a>. T-Mobile will be able to upgrade to new LTE-Advanced technologies faster and cheaper than its competitors. But T-Mobile certainly doesn\u2019t have an LTE-Advanced network today, it won\u2019t have one in the near future and it will be years before it can legitimately make the claim to owning one. LTE-Advanced is an incremental technology<\/a>, and many of its key techniques aren\u2019t even commercially available to carriers yet.<\/p>\n

In my opinion, carriers are already abusing the term LTE-Advanced<\/a>. They haven\u2019t started compounding that abuse by advertising their current or forthcoming LTE networks as 5G, but it\u2019s only a matter of time. Let\u2019s not help them along by doing their marketing for them.<\/p>\n

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