Comcast says it represents a 10 Gigabit cable internet network they are building (it doesn’t exist) so they are basically changing the meaning of the g from generation to gig to act like 10g is 5 generations better (or twice as fast)…or that they have a 10 gigabit network. Neither is accurate. It’s still just cable internet that people have to use because they have no other option.
Fuck Comcast.
I read online they are abandoning the “confusing” 10g branding but I just saw a commercial for it. They think all of their customers are morons and count on folks having no other choices in a lot of cases.
Apologies to anyone outside the United States, this is just complaining about our poor internet options and deceptive advertising by greedy corporations.
Honestly, this is the same shit the telcoms have been doing for decades. They also did it with the previous generations.
When telcoms started promoting “3G” it was a mix between networks with proper broadband speeds, and edge networks that were more like 2.5G. 4G was an even bigger dumpster fire with a very wide array of “fourth generation” specs that ranged from glorified 3G to actual next generation speeds. And 5G is a repeat of this marketing bullshit trend.
You can really see the effects of this if you get to rural coverage areas. Your phone might say it’s on 5G or 4G, and you might be experiencing shit speeds even if you have decent reception. You might be on a part of the network that the marketing department considers 4 or 5G, but doesn’t mean it’s actually fast.
IMHO, we need consumer protection laws that prevent companies from using brand names or generational buzz words to trick customers. Network speeds should be advertised in bits per second, or standardized BPS chunks.
Cell carriers in the US releasing 3G+ technologies branded as 4Gs should have gotten the FTC on a crackdown, but regulatory capture and it is all just marketing fluff. The sales flacks selling it can’t even answer questions like “what kinds of bandwidth can I expect to see? Do I get a minimum QoS?”
“You’re minimum speed in your area is 5G with Unlimited Stream Blast+”
Also, why was 4G called LTE but not 3G or 5G?
It’s all mostly a marketing speak.
LTE is a proper name for the latest flavour of a wireless connectivity steandard. It simply means ‘long-term evolution’, because naming it after the actual underlying algorithms would be ‘orthogonal frequency-division with multiple access’ was too long even for nerds who created that standard, and also it uses simpler frequency-division with multiple access for transmitting data from your phone to the cell tower, so the actual proper name would be ‘OFDMA uplink FDMA downlink’.
And 5G is still mostly LTE, just with extra radio channels and an optional millimeter frequency support.
There were similarly several 3G technologies - HSDPA, HSPA+, DC-HSDPA, DC-HSDPA w/MIMO, each offering a better speed, but that would be confusing, so the operators just named everything as 3G.
So it’s like saying 802.11 instead of Wifi?
Kind of, yeah.
There are WiFi setups that can cover as far as 10 km range, which is firmly inside 4G territory, with a speed to match.
It depends on the carrier. I’m on AT&T’s network, and they have parts of the network that they labeled “4G” and parts that they labeled “LTE.”
The simplest answer is to Google what your carrier considers LTE, 3G, and 4G speeds. Some carriers consider LTE to be their “4G,” some carriers have networks labeled 4G and LTE, some carriers consider LTE to be 3G+, some consider 4G to be 3G+ … it’s all a big mess, it depends on what the marketing team decided to label the network hardware, and every carrier has different definitions for the same terms.