What’s in a name? Getting smug about 4G

Hey smart guy. Yeah you—the guy who likes to point out that LTE and WiMax aren’t really 4G technologies. I want to know where you were four years ago. You know, when marketers adopted the term and it came into a common usage as a means of describing the next round—I can’t say ‘generation’—of network advancement. Your insight would have been quite useful in 2006, but I have to say your input is utterly worthless right now.

For those of you that don’t know the history of the term 4G, the first operator to start using the term in any major way was Sprint when it announced its plans to move forward with WiMax as its mobile broadband technology of the future. Sprint’s use of the term 4G raised a lot of hackles among engineers, standards bodies and Sprint’s competitors. We in the tech and trade media challenged it, putting ‘4G’ in quotes, and writing the usual qualifying statements in the initial news stories, just as we do to describe T-Mobile’s use of 4G to describe its high-speed packet access plus (HSPA+) network today.

The industry should have played the role of enforcer here, but instead they just went with the flow. Vendors and operators supporting the GSM community’s rival standard mobile broadband evolution path started referring to their LTE technologies as 4G also. It wasn’t long before 4G became accepted parlance for all LTE and WiMax networks, though there was still the occasional protest from the more technically pure in our industry (see Stéphane Téral’s contributed column on Connected Planet from earlier this year). At that point we dropped the circumscribing quotes and the long explanatory phrases and started just calling them 4G. We went with the flow.

The point is that the term 4G as we use it today was born out of marketing departments not standards bodies. That may seem deplorable to you, but I can’t say I blame the industry. LTE and WiMax needed a category of their own. While neither might meet the ITU’s definition of a 4G technology, they both represent a new generation of mobile broadband networks. It’s not just that they support faster speeds; they use a completely different radio interface (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) versus CDMA), require new spectrum and new network builds, and change the fundamental focus of the network from voice to IP data.

There’s a big difference between the 3G networks of yesterday and the WiMax and LTE networks being built today. You can forgive the industry for wanting to come up with a catch-all to delineate those differences. And even if you can’t, there’s no escaping the fact that multi-national vendors and mega-operators have million-dollar marketing budgets, while standards bodies don’t. In a battle for mind share between the commercial and technical side of the industry, the marketers are going to win.

Perhaps if there had been a groundswell of protest about the misuse of such terminology in 2006, 2007 or even last year, the industry would have been put in its place and it would have been forced to come up with some other acronym or catchphrase to describe those new networks. But that protest never emerged—at least not until now. Those protest just so happen to coincide with the first large scale launches of WiMax and LTE. Operators that aren’t deploying either of those technologies are looking for a way to market their 3G networks favorable in light of the so-called 4G competition so they’ve either co-opted the term 4G—just as Sprint co-opted it in 2006—or they try to make the case that the speeds and customer experience over the newest 3G networks aren’t really all that different from WiMax and LTE networks. An easy way to do that is to say that LTE and WiMax networks aren’t really 4G after all.

Don’t get me wrong. I think T-Mobile is capable of delivering a competitive service over HSPA+ to the 4G networks being deployed today. And if the industry eventually acquiesces to its use of 4G to describe its HSPA+ networks, then I’ll drop the quotes and qualification phrases in my stories. But make no mistake, T-Mobile, VZW, Sprint and every other operator aren’t arguing over the definition of 4G to defend the purity of technical standards. They’re doing it solely to gain a marketing advantage. By arguing in blog posts and commentary--much like this one--about what really constitutes 4G, we’re not doing anything to further the technical arguments. We’re just backing the marketing claims of one side or the other.