Sorry to re-open this topic but the marketing people out there are getting more irresponsible every day and need to be restrained. Preferably using chains. What’s really bugging me this week is the gratuitous use of the term “4G”. For me 4G has to comply with the ITU definition of a technology providing a peak performance of 100 Mbps to a stationary client and 1 Gbps to a moving client.
Marketing people are often only loosely attached to reality, and they seem to have difficulty understanding this clear definition so let me remind them of something: Wimax is not 4G. Neither is LTE. LTE-A will be 4G, and some future Wimax version may be 4G compliant, but today it isn’t. (Mis)marketing culprits who talk about WiMax as 4G seem to be everywhere including Sprint, Clearwire, and Craig Wireless to name but a few.
Marketing people aren’t the only culprits abusing the “4G” term. A fellow industry analyst – thankfully not from Gartner – was recently quoted as saying: “… fuel the 4G communication lifestyle that consumers are striving for….”.
This is a triumph of marketing over reality. Have you ever met a consumer who is “striving for a 4G lifestyle”? Do your kids come up to you and say “daddy, why don’t we have a 4G lifestyle like the folks next door”? Could you maybe hire an interior decorator and a stylist to upgrade your home and wardrobe to a 4G lifestyle? For those who can’t afford that option buy a bumper sticker saying “My other car has a 4G lifestyle”. And what is a “4G lifestyle” in any case? Does it mean I can receive video spam instead of email spam, and the tweets arrive in a microsecond instead of a millisecond? And if this mythical 4G lifestyle involves hi definition 3D video calls from my mother in law I don’t want any part of it.
Let’s strike a blow for truth and sanity by starting a campaign for real 4G. If it’s not ITU-compliant it’s not 4G.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Junga Junga // Sep 17, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Mr. Jones,
why bother with this?
true, from narrow tech perpsctive ITU needs to approve LTE-A (not LTE) as 4G, later on.
But from custoemr perspective – it’s the amazing future. Doesn’t matter if you call it LTE or LTE-A.
so, even if better to be more accurate and say “near 4G” or just “LTE”, it’s not a huge issue to use “4G”…
2 Nick Jones // Sep 18, 2009 at 3:29 am
The reason I had a little rant about this is that the ITU already accepted WiMax as a 3G technology. So the only reason for operators and vendors to market it as 4G is because they are consciously and cynically trying to confuse buyers. And that really annoys me. Maybe it’s just that I’m a foolish romantic who has lingering and unrealistic expectations of veracity from marketing people.
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