How's your 4G treating you?

[Michael-Dallas]

No, not really. This is just AT&T tricking you into thinking you have 4G coverage everywhere so they can charge you more.

It REALLY irritates me that both AT&T and T-Mobile have been doing this. Their "4G" phones always indicate a 4G connection on the status bar even when you're not in an HSPA+ area. When you're under UMTS or HSPA 7.2 it says 4G when it should be reading 3G. I'm surprised they haven't done this for EDGE coverage as well, which is the only time you'll see your network indicator change.

It's flat out misleading and false advertisement.

Blame T-Mobile, not AT&T. T-Mobile started with marketing HSPA+ as 4G and the other carriers (Verizon and AT&T) raised ****, but T-Mobile won. The problem is there isn't a locked down standard of what 4G is.

So if you (AT&T) know that HSPA+ is not real 4G, but your competitor (T-Mobile) has been marketing themselves as the first 4G network in the U.S. (w/ HSPA+ in fine print) and the FCC sides with your competitor (T-Mobile), what would you (AT&T) do?

In the grand scheme of things, T-Mobile is shooting themselves in the foot for this short-term gain. Verizon got a head start with their LTE network. AT&T is catching up w/ their LTE network.

If you want "4G" speeds, then wait for an LTE Windows Phone. The Lumia 900 is blisteringly fast... in the magnitude of 12-15mb down and 2+mb up. Then again, the LTE frequency is pretty light on traffic right now...

 

[TexZenFool]

I'm usually in my home office and on WiFi so 4G doesn't matter much to me. But I just turned WiFi off to run a quick test.

0.71 Mbit/sec down
0.33 Mbit/sec up

Not great but better than I ever got on my old Palm Pre with 3G.