NEW ORLEANS—What the heck is 4G, anyway? There's a lot of confusion around the meaning of "4G," if you ask wireless carrier CEOs. At yesterday's keynote here at the CTIA trade show, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said "consumers are confused by what 4G means." T-Mobile's CEO showed a video that said his 4G network was fastest, while AT&T's CEO shot back the same.
So I asked Chris Pearson, the president of industry association 4G Americas, what he thinks constitutes 4G.
"At 4G Americas, our typical line is HSPA+ 21 and above," he said.
Okay, okay. That's all well and good, except for the fact that 4G Americas members T-Mobile and AT&T have both been selling slower HSPA 14.4 devices as "4G" for a while now.
"[Consumers] don't really care. All they want is a mobile broadband experience," Pearson said, with T-Mobile's Alex Schwerin defining that as "your home broadband experience on the go."
We all then joined in a hearty debate about LTE, HSPA+, and WiMAX. Neville Ray, T-Mobile CTO and 4G Americas chairman, pitched in with a defense of his carrier's HSPA+ 42 as something that "can actually outperform LTE." He's right, in some circumstances.
But nobody around the table was willing to face up to the marketing of devices like the HTC Sensation 4G and Motorola Atrix 4G, both running at HSPA 14.4, as 4G. And then there's the conundrum posed by MetroPCS, which is running 4G LTE, but in narrow channels so it doesn't achieve very high speeds.
Ray offered up, "[4G] is an experience that is significantly better than the existing 3G experience."
Let's not get started on what he means by "existing 3G experience."
Standards bodies aren't helping to define this. If 4G Americas is drawing the line at HSPA+ 21, its members aren't listening. The International Telecommunications Union once tried to set "4G" as two technologies that don't exist yet, LTE-Advanced and WiMax 2, but then backed off.
"They basically said that all these evolved technologies can be called 4G, HSPA+ and WiMAX and LTE," Pearson said. "They walked away from it and said this is a marketing term," Pearson said.
4G Americas: LTE Roaming Will Happen
Pearson also opined that the LTE roaming problem isn't as bad as some people say it is. The industry is settling on AWS as a general LTE band for the Americas and 2.6GHz as a general LTE band for Europe, which will provide roaming coverage on most carriers, he said.
Carrier's new LTE networks are a mishmash of spectra, but those two bands should offer at least some coverage in most places, he said.
Verizon, AT&T, MetroPCS, Leap, and T-Mobile are all building out LTE on the AWS band. Sprint, notably is not - then again, Sprint isn't a member of 4G Americas.
With a tangle of LET spectrum bands and no agreements signed, roaming is going to stay 3G for a while, Ray said.
"I think the international roaming challenge is solved in the near to medium term by HSPA," he said.
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