4G or 4Gery
The use of the term “4G” by Cell C to describe its 900 MHz HSPA+ network has come in for considerable criticism in South Africa, not only from its direct competitors but from other sources as well.
If you define 4G according to the specifications of the ITU’s IMT-Advanced system then CellC’s network, like others which claim this distinction, does not come close to reaching the objectives of this 4G standard.
Marketing people are naturally more careless with hard facts than are engineers and scientists, although perhaps not as outrageously so as some politicians and religious leaders.
In the case of 4G prime responsibility for initial widespread misuse of the term probably lies with Sprint and Clearwire in the U.S. They have been motivated to try to present WiMAX networks as a leap forward with revolutionary implications for the mobile Internet compared to 3G networks.
One question if the descriptor 4G becomes well established with HSPA/HSPA+ is what operators will call IMT-Advanced networks when they become available, perhaps in the middle of the second decade of this century. Will they use the term 5G, or some variation of 4G such as True 4G, or 4G Enhanced, or 4G Plus, or Super4G?
The more serious problem, independently of the challenges to marketers to find new misleading names to try to differentiate their offerings from those of competitors, is that there are some fundamental misunderstandings and understandable confusion among customers about what they can and should reasonably expect from mobile services.
User experiences can deteriorate rapidly as the number of simultaneous broadband users in a cell increases. To take one example of HSPA deployed in 20 MHz in a typical cell in the U.S. the throughput per user drops to under 1 Mbps when the number of active users in the cell reaches 10, whereas each cell in the U.S. contains on average about 1,000 customers and some of course several times more.
Today only a minority of these customers uses broadband services, but a few years from now the picture will be very different.
Inevitably mobile operators will have to manage traffic via innovative pricing, offloading and other schemes so that mobile networks remain attractive to users, or even avoid the worst case of becoming practically usable for their purposes.
Marketing is meant to entice, which is an honorable purpose, but exaggerated promises and claims to customers are extremely dangerous.
In this context use of the term “4G” is but a minor infraction compared to the much broader neglect of trying to educate most customers who care nothing about the details of technology, only what they experience, regarding expectations that are reasonable and those that have no basis in reality.
Honesty from mobile operators << Do you think they want to deceive consumers?
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