I Just Noticed We Had 40 MHz LTE Channels in Europe, Counting the American Way

So far, pretty much everyone in the industry measured channel bandwidths in what either the downlink or the uplink channel provides. A UMTS channel thus always had a bandwidth of 5 MHz despite twice the spectrum being used, 5 MHz for the downlink and another 5 MHz for the uplink. Sometimes this was also described as 2 x 5 MHz. But it seems some in the US are now adding uplink and downlink together as for example in this Gigaom article. A small 5 MHz LTE carrier now has a bandwidth of 10 MHz. Sounds nice when comparing it to other US network operators that in their words also use 10 MHz LTE carriers, which are, of course 2 x 10 MHz. So by those standards network operators in Europe using the 1800 or 2600 MHz bands already have 40 MHz LTE deployed! That sounds nice! After 4G, Real 4G, True 4G and LTE-Advanced it's the latest smoke bomb to confuse the world and make yourself look better than you really are. Sigh…