How AT&T Totally Flubbed 4G
AT&T is lying about 4G. Shamelessly. The company's two “4G” phones and its “4G” modem don't deliver 4G even by AT&T's own wishy-washy standards. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as the 4G police, and AT&T is going to get away with debasing the term …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second swing at the same target: BGR ran its '4G forgery' argument back in November 2010, and AT&T answered in January with a detailed 4G roadmap promising faster HSPA+ upgrades and an LTE buildout. PC Magazine's charge is narrower and harder to wave off — the two phones and the modem AT&T itself labels '4G' don't hit 4G even by the loose definition AT&T set out in that January plan.
What makes the accusation land is timing: it lands in the same week AT&T confirmed a 150GB monthly DSL usage cap with overage fees starting May 2, so customers are being sold a faster-sounding network tier on one hand and metered limits on the other.
First-order effects
- Buyers picking up AT&T's '4G'-branded handsets or USB modem this quarter are paying a premium label for speeds the magazine says fall short even of AT&T's own stated threshold — with no standards body or '4G police' to force a correction.
- AT&T gets away with it in the short term: absent enforcement, the '4G' branding stays on shelves and in ads exactly as-is.
Second-order effects
- Verizon and Sprint, which anchor their pitches to LTE and WiMAX respectively, are pushed into a branding arms race where marketing definitions — not measured throughput — decide who can claim the generational lead.
- Pairing the inflated '4G' label with the confirmed May 2 DSL cap lets AT&T monetize demand it created on paper: heavier advertised-speed expectations meet metered overage billing.
Third-order effects
- If carriers learn that relabeling existing networks beats deploying new ones, generation terms like '4G' stop signaling capability and become pure marketing assets — shifting the burden of verifying speed claims onto testers, press, and buyers.
- A repeatable playbook here points toward litigation or regulatory attention eventually defining what a generation label legally means, because no technical body currently does.
The trend: Carrier marketing has outrun actual network deployment, with each wireless generation's name defined by advertising departments first and engineering second.