T-Mobile will market its HSPA+ as ‘America’s largest 4G network’

Desperate, pathetic and completely misleading, T-Mobile will start confusing Americans with what 4G is. Or, in this case, isn’t. First of all, the International Telecommunications Union – a body that defines technological standards – decided last week what can be classified as 4G: WiMax 2 or LTE Advanced. Neither of those networks are commercially deployed anywhere in the world.

T-Mobile, who has neither a WiMax or LTE network, has been using HSPA+ for its high-speed broadband solution. The carrier was so late to the 3G party with HSPA and HSPA+. And now that it doesn’t have a viable 4G solution in the short term, it’s just going to go and mislead the public about the problem that it faces.

For some time now, the fourth largest carrier has been touting its network as delivering “4G-like” speeds. Now, when we think of 4G-like speeds, perhaps we’re used to the 3-6Mbps downloads that Sprint has been delivering with WiMax. Users will likely see similar – if not slightly better – speeds from Verizon’s and AT&T’s coming LTE networks. However, carriers in other countries like TeliaSonera offers its LTE customers speeds of anywhere between 25-45Mbps down.

Quite frankly, I’ll forgive Sprint, Verizon and AT&T for calling their networks 4G. It’s definitely a completely different experience from what users are currently seeing on 3G networks. Both WiMax and LTE also use OFDM technology, which is different from CDMA and WCDMA that’s currently in use for today’s high speed broadband mobile networks.

T-Mobile is just using a boosted version of what we have as 3G today. Sure, it’s fast and in some cases it’s slightly faster than what we’ve seen on Sprint’s WiMax network, but there is no way in hell it even comes close to being classified as a 4G technology. NOT. EVEN. CLOSE.

Shame on you, T-Mobile. Here’s an idea: instead of spending the money on falsely marketing your HSPA+ network as 4G, why not allocate those resources into deploying a real 4G network instead?

[Via TMONews]