AT&T goes cheap, renaming 3G to 4G

[Martin030908]

just goes to show you most consumers don't do their homework.

it'll only be a matter of time before we start hearing AT&T customers stating they have '4G' phones!

I don't even think I'm gonna burst their bubble, I'll let them continue on blindly

 

[Big Ry]

I ran a speed test on a Samsung Captivate at my best friend's AT&T store while I was waiting for him to finish work. I got 1.1Mbps down and 0.1 Mbps up (Philly suburb around 9:30PM on a Wednesday). I mentioned it to him, and he confirmed that pretty much what he always gets on his iPhone and other phones.

I dont know what "tweak" AT&T has done, but they were no where near 7.2Mbps...and to say its jumping to 22Mbps!? Man do I HIGHLY doubt that, even as a max. I bet their average, if it even changes at all, is at best 3Mbps lol.

 

[furbearingmammal]

I was in target the other day when I heard a few guys talking phone tech, so I motives over near then to have a listen. They were from att and had some paperwork regarding stuff from CES. He had some paperwork on the atrix, and said it had a release date of no later than q1. Anyway, I asked one about the renaming of 3g. He went on to tell me about changing the back something (related to bandwidth) and this would allow for a new max bandwidth of up to 22kbps on their current hardware, vs the current theoretical max of 7.2kbps (which I NEVER saw when I was at att). Not the biggest techie when it comes to the companies tech, but he sounded like he knew his stuff and knew it well. I wish now looking back that I had asked what his title was, but at the time I hadn't been scouting info for here our I would have.

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Unless they were governing the data throughput and pulled the governor that is 100% crap. There's no "simple" fix to increase their data rate without overhauling the whole system.

If it was software-based the hackers would have found it by now and cleared the block. If it's hardware-based then the old phones wouldn't work with it. Catch-22.

 

[hemorrdroid]

Like I said, I'm no expert on this stuff. But he made it sound like it was hardware based, not on the phones, but on their system. I agree, when I had my iphone,i was getting probably 1.5mb max, mostly slower, never saw over 2mb/s speeds. He worded it like there was a bottleneck, that would be replaced. Just thought I'd share what I heard.

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[Diordna]

Yep, the commercials were saying "AT&T got faster now with 4g speed!" or similar to that, I know they just renamed it but saying it's faster cause of it, is that legal??

 

[KZIWarrior]

"Study finds consumers want what they fail to understand"
:rofl3: UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE DECADE:rofl3:

 

[bazar6]

Yep, the commercials were saying "AT& got faster now with 4g speed!" or similar to that, I know they just renamed it but saying it's faster cause of it, is that legal??

That's what a lot of us began wondering, but since there's no legal definition of 4G, they can say 4G. Like someone above, they could say 5G if they wanted, but then we'd just be laughing at them.

And all those commercials, check out the fine print. I caught one that said "4G delivered over HSPA+...", but I can't find a youtube video or anything to take a closer look at it.

And yea I questioned the "newser.com" source, but it links to a WSJ article : AT&T Relabels Wireless Network, Speeds Up Next Generation Rollout - WSJ.com

 

[mikehal38]

Yep, the commercials were saying "AT& got faster now with 4g speed!" or similar to that, I know they just renamed it but saying it's faster cause of it, is that legal??

I believe what at&t meant to say was that at&t just got faster toward their death due to vzw's 4g speeds. at&t is hurting and they know it. Now they are doing everything they can to keep customers.

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