4G Smoke and Mirrors

I guess I was asleep this past month when the Canadian wireless carriers finished their rebranding of their 3G networks to 4G. I had heard of carrier advertising for 4G instead of 3G but I thought it was a limited marketing ploy. As I mentioned in my November blog last year, you require new devices to get the huge speeds promised on the WiMax or LTE 4G networks and that these new networks needed to be built and wouldn’t be available for some time. So when I bought my 3G Android last month running on the TELUS 3G network, I was pretty sure of what I was buying. But according to TELUS marketing this week, it became a 4G phone. Have the carriers given us something for free? Hardly…

In reality, it’s a marketing gimmick. According to an internal Rogers posting, the company changed the marketing of its “3G HSPA+” network to “4G HSPA+” to align with other carriers. It stated that “the Rogers network is not changing. Only the terminology is changing”. In other words, the network will not get faster, despite the use of a network classification that implies faster speeds:

“This change provides consistency for our customers and also aligns with the most recent definition of 4G from the International Telecommunications Union, which says 4G is any technology that shows a substantial level of improvement to previous 3G networks. Adding 4G terminology will bring us on par with Bell and TELUS and close the perceived gap.”

To be fair, it really wasn’t the Canadian carriers that started the marketing smoke and mirrors. In January 2011, AT&T renamed its 3G network to 'compete' with other carriers that have beefed up their 3G network speeds, and they started marketing their network as 4G, even though it actually wasn't a 4G network by definition (WiMax or LTE). They plan to rollout their real 4G using LTE by the end of 2013. Verizon and T Mobile also began marketing 4G and Bell and TELUS in Canada quietly began rebranding as well this spring. But it wasn’t until I was walking in a mall this week and saw a TELUS ad for a Galaxy 4G that I went in to see the new device. Lo and behold, it was the same device I bought last month! The marketing blitz finally hit me but boy, was I slow!

Bell Canada spokesman Jason Laszlo confirmed that Bell will now distinguish any service slower than three Mbps as 3G and anything faster than that as 4G. Laszlo pointed out that while the definition of 4G speeds may have changed, service providers like Bell are still actively developing and testing the new LTE technology that would offer 100 Mbps speeds. He says it is too early to tell what this upcoming technology would be named. The truth is that Rogers will be the first Canadian carrier to deploy a limited trial of a real 4G network in Ottawa this fall.

You really have to applaud the wireless marketers; they sure know how to sell sizzle! It’s good to know I have the fastest Android phone on the fastest network (so they say)- I just happen to also have the same phone with the same speed that was introduced a year and a half ago. But it’s 4G, right?