How AT&T Totally Flubbed 4G 199
adeelarshad82 writes "Turns out that AT&T may be lying about 4G. The company's two '4G' phones and its '4G' modem don't deliver 4G even by AT&T's own standards. In fact, test results show that the company is delivering '4G' devices that are actually slower than the carrier's own 3G devices. So how can they get away with this? Well, initially the International Telecommunications Union defined 4G as a bunch of super-fast technologies nobody used yet, but the ITU crumbled under pressure from various cell phone companies and now defines 4G as any cellular Internet network that's faster than what was considered the fastest technology in 2009. Between the revised 4G standards and a little fine print in its ads, AT&T is able to legally indemnify itself against the fact that its current 4G claim is totally worthless. While other carriers also claim that they have 4G networks, Verizon's LTE is the only technology which comes close to real 4G."
Re:Pathetic ITU (Score:5, Interesting)
What's more, the ICU charges a small fortune for said standards documents.
Part of the blame is on the ICU - the carriers started advertising 4G before the standards came out, forcing the standards to meet the claims. This is no different from how Netscape and Microsoft killed HTML 3.1 when it finally came out and forced the W3C to adopt a nonsensical bunch of crap as a replacement. The fragmentation that followed permitted Microsoft to kill Netscape and caused much of the crap that followed. The W3C will be picking up the pieces for years.
Standards bodies should be flexible but they must ultimately be the law enforcement of all technology and crafts. They are the modern version of the guild hall, the corporations are merely the apprentices within.
Re:Who cares about 4G (Score:5, Interesting)
Why can't they just quote what their average download speed is?
Because then people will divide their 20 meg cap by their 20 meg marketing speed and assume they can only use their phone for one second, and "I'm not paying that much for 1 second of service". Even if the 20 meg speed is pure marketing and you'll actually achieve 9600 baud speeds under normal use.