It’s sad to see history repeating itself. Back in 2012 one network operator in the US that, at the time, had not yet introduced LTE decided to just rebrand its dual carrier HSPA network into 4G. Done, a 4G network overnight out of thin air with a bit of a creative redesign of the network indicator logo on devices! Other operators were furious and looked for ways out. One operator that already had an LTE network decided to call it “Real LTE” in advertisements. Now that 5G networks are on the horizon, history repeats itself, at least in the US, the land of ‘creative’ marketing.
This time, the same approach is used by a different network operator. Marketing the aggregation of 3 LTE carriers as LTE+ is no longer good enough, no, that should be more like a 5Ge network now (e = enhanced), again with a bit of a ‘creative’ redesign of the network logo in the status bar of devices!
But as we all know, that’s not the only creative marketing that is only done in the US compared to the rest of the world. In the US, some operators also count FDD spectrum twice, and thus appear to use as much spectrum as network operators do in other parts of the world, except that they don’t…
So if history repeats itself, I can hardly wait for a network operator with “Real 5G”. But then, what is 5G anyway? If you dare to use just 10 MHz of low frequency spectrum for 5G and then call your network 5G, well, that’s at least as lame as calling a 3CA LTE network 5Ge.
Marketing…