
AT&T will put a fake 5G logo on its 4G LTE phones - devy
https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/at-t-to-begin-upgrading-existing-lte-phones-to-5g-e
======
DannyBee
They've done this kind of ploy forever.

They also require that the strength bars display the highest reception of
_any_ type of service it can receive, regardless if that is what it is using
right now.

So it may display 4 bars and LTE but it's really 4 bars for GSM service,
despite using LTE atm.

They do this because it works when it comes to reviews and perception.

There was a phone that people complained about reception on that was
displaying the current service signal strength using a realistic algorithm.

Review sites, etc, complained about it compared to other phones despite it
being better in actuality.

A "fix" was issued. That fix was to use the same signal bar algorithm as
everyone else. The same review sites/etc were awash with how much better
everyone's reception was and gladness the bug had been fixed.

~~~
murderfs
Yeah, pretty much all of the carriers cheat, and demand the ability to cheat,
e.g.:
[https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...](https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/dad385ae29e13a04500fd698e585f933cd352e53)

~~~
rjbwork
What the fuck Android? Why are you helping mobile carriers lie to their
customers?

~~~
jarfil
Signal bars are meaningless anyway. Even a raw dB measurement wouldn't tell
much about the service quality, so they might as well switch to a "coverage /
no coverage" indicator.

~~~
kurthr
To go a step further for GSM (I don't know precisely for 4G, but I suspect it
is the same) the base station determines both handset dB/SNR/Quality and
commands the handset power which usually is limiting performance. It is likely
this setting that allows the handset to report its "number of bars"...

So if you don't let them lie on the handset... it's likely that the network
providers would just start lying to the handsets at an even deeper level than
they already do. Just get the marketing silliness out of the way at as high a
level as possible so engineers can make our coverage better.

~~~
gsich
there are at least 4 values.

rsrp, rsrq, sinr, rssi

rsrq is probably the important one. You can clearly see usage of the cell
tower with that.

------
freedomben
Seeing a lot of comments here that are along the lines of, "this is typical
marketing aka lying." Just wanted to say (as a marketing major and former
marketing guy) these are most assuredly _not_ the same thing, and I think we
make a grave error by normalizing the idea that lying == marketing. Lying is
not ok. Marketing is perfectly ok. Let's be careful lest we make excuses like,
"Oh they're just marketing"

~~~
opportune
Marketing is not perfectly ok, at best it alerts us to things we weren't going
to buy because we didn't know about them. But most of the time it either 1)
encourages us to buy things we weren't already going to buy (like the $20 shit
they sell on tv) or 2) attempts to win mindshare/sales over some other
competing brand, which is also wasteful because it's ultimately just a product
trying to carve itself a larger piece of a relatively fixed-size pie. Or it
does some other nefarious stuff like trying to boost PR of some business or
sway our political opinion. And many of the methods that marketing uses to
accomplish these goals leverage negative human psychology like making us feel
ugly/fat/poor/stupid if we don't make that purchase we weren't going to make
originally.

Open a magazine/watch tv/disable adblock/look at roadside ads and you'll see
that very rarely are ads actually making the world a better place.

~~~
tomsmeding
I don't agree with your statements that (almost?) all marketing is bad because
it tries to promote products. I believe a company has the right to try to get
people interested in their product, because if not, how would people get to
know about it? Hearing other people talk about it? Those other people
should've known about it in the first place (how?) and this is promotion as
well. The idea of product promotion at its core is not bad, it's inherent to
how our economy works.

> And many of the methods that marketing uses to accomplish these goals
> leverage negative human psychology like making us feel ugly/fat/poor/stupid
> if we don't make that purchase we weren't going to make originally.

_This_ is where I agree with you, however. Promotion is one thing, and making
the world a better place with every single thing you do is hardly possible (or
necessary), but making the world a decidedly worse place is not what we're
looking for. The shaming tactic that you describe is something that works in
marketing, and it may not even be lying, but it's bad.

------
TomMckenny
I like that every single brand of toilet paper now boasts "8=16" or "12=32"
etc.

It's a strange comfortable flexibility we have developed around truth.

It's almost as if "freedom of speech" means you can massage the truth if it
increase sales but god forbid you make a drawing of 90 year old cartoon mouse.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I like that every single brand of toilet paper now boasts "8=16" or "12=32"
> etc.

The left is number of rolls in the package, the right is the number of the
same brand “standard” rolls it is equivalent to by length (there is
accommodating text which makes this explicit); this facilitates price
comparisons among packages with different roll sizes.

~~~
Dylan16807
Yeah, it's basically the same as having both serving size and net weight. Far
from a problem.

~~~
TomMckenny
Ah, and it happens that no one makes any "standard" rolls.

And what about Pam Spray On pure olive oil labeled fat-free? Serving size
small enough for the fat to round to zero but not the olive oil content?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Ah, and it happens that no one makes any "standard" rolls.

Yes they do, e.g Charmin Regular rolls (which is important, because some
dispensers won't handle bigger rolls), but in any case the utility for
comparisons doesn't depend on regular rolls being an option, just as volume in
liters of a drink product is useful even if 1.0l isn't one of the package
sizes.

~~~
TomMckenny
Which would mean they are comparing to a standard they made up. Which is the
gist of my point.

Going further down the rabbit hole I find:

Charmin rolls labeled "4=16" have 308 sheets. "Regular Rolls" were, when they
were available, 121 sheets.

Other implied "standards" within Charmin vary from sku to sku. So apparently
the Charmin Standard does not exist in their product line and is not a fixed
value either.

They could just to put the total inches^2 on the package of course.

~~~
austhrow743
Elsewhere in the thread is people talking about how a business tried to do
away with "on sale" shenanigans, just listed reasonable prices, and got fucked
horribly.

When it comes to anything marketing/sale you have to assume the answer to
weird messages like that is "because thats what the consumer wants to see".
They want everything they buy to be on sale. They want their toilet paper
measured in make believe units. They want me to say "yes we have an option to
record that credential, it's just not turned on for this demo" rather than
"yeah we can rename the heading of that textbox during implementation" during
a software demo.

------
JoeAltmaier
Reminds me of a Subaru Forester I owned. It had a badge 'pzev' which
apparently meant 'partial zero-emissions vehicle'. Which meant what? not zero
emissions certainly. It was a regular gas car.

~~~
lemoncucumber
Yeah I have a Subaru too and I've always thought that was silly. In their
defense though, it's not just something they made up for marketing.

Rather, it's a term for a silly thing California allows automakers to do to
get around the requirement of selling actual zero-emissions vehicles:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_zero-
emissions_vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_zero-
emissions_vehicle)

~~~
mikeash
It’s a bit of a silly term but what it describes seems like a sensible thing.
It’s meaningless if you’re only worried about CO2 but it’s significant when
considering pollution that affects air quality.

~~~
lemoncucumber
Right, I guess I’m just way more worried about CO2 than about smog.

~~~
llampx
Why? Even the EU is moving away from emphasizing CO2 over particulate
emissions.

~~~
lemoncucumber
Because if we don’t dramatically cut our CO2 emissions quickly we’re
irreversibly fucked? And part of that means moving away from ICE vehicles
carrying a single person.

------
weliketocode
You know how your 65" tv is actually 64.5 inches?

That's called rounding.

Now, imagine your TV was advertised as 4Ke when it was actually 1080p.

That's called false advertising.

~~~
LeoPanthera
> Now, imagine your TV was advertised as 4Ke when it was actually 1080p.

This happens with projectors. Many projectors are advertised as "4K" when in
fact they only _accept_ a 4K signal, but still project a 1080p picture.

Some of them have a kind of hacky trick which involves vibrating the image
chip, so that it can project a second set of pixels offset from the first by
half a pixel, which gets you a ~2K picture - kinda sorta.

~~~
kalleboo
1080p _is_ 2K. The "K" measurements are horizontal, not vertical like 1080p.

------
acdha
AT&T also did that with the 4G rollout – my iPhone 4S, which lacked 4G
hardware, would display 4G in the status bar, which was especially cruel since
they had a huge capacity problem and the average speeds were in the double-
digit Kbps range.

~~~
mailslot
I remember that. HSPA+, which was just fast 3G. It was an improvement from
what I remember, but the first time I tasted LTE, I felt ripped off.

~~~
acdha
Yes - definitely more bandwidth, although IIRC the hardware on my 4S didn’t
get full advantage, but the latency and time to reestablish a session were so
much worse.

------
mherdeg
Keith's blog post on this is great : [http://blog.keithw.org/2013/07/3g-and-
me.html](http://blog.keithw.org/2013/07/3g-and-me.html)

Carriers are uncomfortable about publishing the actual throughput and latency
characteristics of their Internet access but are perfectly happy to slap a new
"g" on their boxes for marketing purposes.

------
bubblethink
Tangential: I find networking (both wifi and cellular) to be one of the most
problematic parts in a smartphone. These are quite literally the things that
make a smartphone. This may be OS and device specific, but with AOSP on a
pixel, these are my common issues: 1) Frequent wifi disconnects 2) Phone shows
connected to both wifi and cellular but internet doesn't work 3) Cellular data
is supposed to be always on but doesn't work as intended 4) Wifi-Calling drops
call if wifi disconnects (which is probably a combination of 1 and 3). 4)
Phone prefers shitty wifi (for eg. while driving by near an AP) over cellular.
Does everyone have some variation of these problems ? Have iphones solved
these for good ?

~~~
gcbw2
this do not sell. A while ago phones where purchased on internal memory size
(and a fixed $100 upgrade steps for some reason). Until recently purchase
decision was based on screen size, bigger the better. Now they are decided on
a notch on the screen apparently.

Absolutely nobody buying phones care about the items you listed,
unfortunately.

~~~
callalex
They absolutely do, it’s just impossible to quantify. When the WiFi hardware
is garbage on a phone non-technical people just call it “slow/buggy/glitchy”
without really being able to identify why.

------
grecy
I worked for a telco who advertised their service as "3G" because
theoretically, under ideal conditions, it could hit a speed that was somehow
close to what we all think of as "3G".

Marketing felt perfectly fine about it, even though it was a blatant lie. They
ignored Engineering. I think it's just how the world is now.

------
fenwick67
Remember... we still never got 4G. Speed requirements were set and nobody ever
met them, so they just called it 4G-LTE.

Nobody should be shocked that this is happening again for 5G and calling 5G-E.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
AT&T did the same with HSPA+ (calling it 4G). Just so they could be one of the
first to have 4G out the door. At least from a lying, ahem, marketing
perspective.

~~~
kalleboo
I think the timeline was Sprint first launched WiMAX and called it "4G" (even
though it was never any faster than HSDPA) and then T-Mobile and AT&T couldn't
look worse with a similarly-specced network so they jumped on the bandwagon.

------
baby
I don't understand how these companies can get away with so much. I had to
find a plan a month ago, and none of these companies display their prices on
their websites. They force you to go to a shop, where people don't want to
show you the prices and the different plans either. You're met with aggressive
sales people and you end up paying for something that you have no idea if it's
fair or not.

------
anigbrowl
I really don't think the first amendment should apply to corporate
communications that are designed to deceive consumers.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
> I really don't think the first amendment should apply to speech that
> deceives consumers.

FTFY. It's not about corporations being evil, per se. Free speech should not
be a defense against false advertising, any more than it's a defense against
shouting fire in a movie theatre or threatening bodily harm.

~~~
anigbrowl
Agreed but I picked corporations as a practical threshold for commercial
exaggeration vs trying to police people at flea markets or the like, and also
because the whole purpose of incorporation is to shed liability (in most
cases) and that the fiscal immunity should come at a price of some freedom.

------
notSupplied
Does a technical definition of 5G even exist? Going from 3 to 4G was mostly
about the transition from CDMA to ODFMA with other perks tacked on. This is
why even though the marketing department at AT&T called HSPA+ "4G" the
engineers knew it really wasn't.

What is the equivalent step change for 5G that is as significant as OFDMA, or
is 5G is purely a collection of incremental improvements?

------
franciscop
I remember something similar happening back in the days with totally unrelated
tech:

\- MP3: Can play audio. Marketing and tech play nice together.

\- MP4: Can play video. Marketing and tech play nice together

\- MP5: Wait what? Marketing needs "next" iterarion, it doesn't make any
sense. It's just MP4 with some random silly feature (depending on the
company).

~~~
floatboth
MP5: is literally a gun :D

~~~
franciscop
Oh this happened back in Spain when I was a teenager, so I had no idea lol

------
dang
Url changed from
[https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/21/18151764/att-5g-evolutio...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/21/18151764/att-5g-evolution-
logo-rollout-fake-network), which points to this.

------
basicplus2
Telstra Australia call 3Gpp service 4G and they call 4G 4Gplus..

Its essentially fraud

~~~
quickthrower2
Displaying the speed in MBps would be much more useful

------
stagger87
I'm not sure why I'm struggling to find an answer to this question, but does
anyone know if the plan for 5G is to have cell phones transmitting at 28 and
39 GHz with the new sample rates? Or are mm wave freqs primarily for
infrastructure? I'd love to read about mm transceivers on UE's if anyone has
any information about it.

~~~
wmf
Yes, it will happen. [https://www.anandtech.com/show/13106/qualcomm-announces-
thei...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/13106/qualcomm-announces-their-
first-5g-mmwave-antenna-module-qtm052-coming-this-year)

------
remcob
I wish we could show real bandwidth, latency and drop rate instead. Even
better, have industry agree on minimum values for one bar to four bars of
connectivity. And gradually upgrade these requirements over time.

All these names just confuse consumers and distract from solving the actual
problems. The radio technology stack is mostly an implementation detail.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
How would you know real bandwidth and latency without running a test?

How would you run a test often enough to keep the signal information up-to-
date, without impacting data usage and/or battery?

It's a great idea, but I think there's a reason we don't do it. RSSI values
work well enough.

~~~
aftbit
Monitor existing radio traffic? Would work at least for bandwidth and drop
rate, maybe not latency. If the user isn't using the radios, fall back on a
signal-strength based estimate. For bonus points, learn the estimated
connectivity based on correlations between previously measured radio metrics
and signal strength in the same location.

Or just hide the bars and show a binary "go/no-go" symbol to indicate if the
phone has a current radio connection. Your phone is always connected to GCM or
Apple's equivalent so why not use the health of that connection as an
indicator?

~~~
Wowfunhappy
I find that when my iPhone has one bar, web pages often load much more slowly
than when I have five bars. So I find the distinction moderately useful.

------
sampo
I know AT&T phones (or perhaps all American carriers?) display HSPA+ as 4G,
but in Europe the same is known as 3.75G.

~~~
floatboth
Or "3.5G", but Android without any vendor crap (i.e. LineageOS or any other
AOSP based build) doesn't use the "G" above 3G: "H", "H+", "LTE" and "LTE+"

------
torgian
5G is practically useless in a way, due to its frequency and how your hand
could block the signals too.

~~~
kalleboo
Different carriers/countries are deploying 5G on different frequencies. Some
are using lower frequencies similar to the ones currently used by 3G/4G

~~~
torgian
That's good to hear, but wouldnt the change in frequency lower the speed of
5g? if it's similar to 3/4G, wouldnt that just make 5G as fast as 4G?

------
ksec
The one thing I wish would happen now is some carrier have the guts to finally
roll out their 5G, or 3GPP Rel 15 in full and call it, 6G.

Because their competitor decided to call something 5G which isn't 5G, they
have no choice but rename their network as 6G.

I hope that is T-Mobile US.

------
Aardwolf
It's about better than 4G but not real 5G, so why not 4½G or something like
that...

~~~
LeoPanthera
"4.5G" is in fact what it's called by engineers:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_Advanced_Pro](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_Advanced_Pro)

------
rayiner
That's not the title of the article, and the premise behind the HN version of
the title is at best confused. "5G" is not a specific technology. What you
might be thinking of as "5G" is 3GPP's "5G NR" which is a new air interface.
But 3GPP will continue to evolve LTE in parallel alongside 5G NR into the "5G"
era: [https://www.grandmetric.com/2018/10/29/3gpp-
release-16-furth...](https://www.grandmetric.com/2018/10/29/3gpp-
release-16-further-lte-and-5g-nr-enhancements). The reason for that is that
the really big benefits of 5G NR come at higher frequency bands which will not
always be appropriate for cellular service. At lower frequency bands, evolved
versions of LTE will continue to be relevant for the foreseeable future.

------
pgnas
Sure, why not, the company that redefined what "unlimited" means is now going
to put false advertising on its junk.

At any point , is the US Government going step up to the plate and actually do
it's job?

------
qyz721
This is the kind of thing users _could_ have control over if they use their
own operating system, correct? Are custom ROMs like LineageOS configured to
check for this kind of thing?

------
samstave
So, may i place a fake AT&T logo on a Huwai phone?

------
godelski
If we can define peanut butter, we should be able to define network names.
Names mean things after all.

------
speedplane
AT&T is the worst. Nearly a century of bad behavior over and over again.

------
mathattack
Sounds like they are learning marketing from IBM.

------
justtopost
Who charges these people with fraud, and why are they not acting?

------
trumped
they should get sued for this but they won't...

------
gammateam
I thought the author's avatar was the facepalm emoji at first

woulda been fitting

------
beastman82
Marketers lie.

------
briandear
This HN title is pretty clickbaity and doesn’t represent the actual title of
the article. The word “fake” appears nowhere in the article. “Fake” is
subjective in this context.

