Sprint joins AT&T attack party with accusations of 'blatant' 5G deception
There’s no question about the impact 5G cellular technology will have on the mobile industry as a whole... eventually, substantially improving speeds, reducing network latency, and enabling groundbreaking new use cases, but for the time being, all of these major upgrades are largely theoretical.
As such, AT&T’s somewhat misleading recent move of rebranding its 4G LTE services as 5GE (5G Evolution) didn’t go down very well with customers and especially rivals, which were quick to ridicule the “initiative” or outright jump down AT&T’s throat.
For once, Sprint seems to agree with Verizon, as well as potential future brother carrier T-Mobile, that AT&T is “blatantly misleading consumers.” The official statement provided to Engadget by John Saw, Sprint’s Chief Technology Officer, is the most brutal takedown of AT&T’s shenanigans yet.
For its part, the nation’s second-largest wireless service provider attempted to field the jabs by stressing 5GE is not technically the same thing as 4G LTE, with the new logo and marketing signaling certain customers are in fact in an “enhanced experience area.”
Of course, Sprint plans to release several 5G-enabled handsets in the near future, including at least one new Samsung flagship, while in terms of infrastructure, the eventual completion of a proposed T-Mobile merger would certainly help both operators speed up their rollouts and nationwide expansions.
As such, AT&T’s somewhat misleading recent move of rebranding its 4G LTE services as 5GE (5G Evolution) didn’t go down very well with customers and especially rivals, which were quick to ridicule the “initiative” or outright jump down AT&T’s throat.
For its part, the nation’s second-largest wireless service provider attempted to field the jabs by stressing 5GE is not technically the same thing as 4G LTE, with the new logo and marketing signaling certain customers are in fact in an “enhanced experience area.”
But Sprint is dealing with this situation in a more straightforward, no-nonsense way, highlighting “5GE is not real 5G.” Standards-based “real 5G” will be coming to Sprint subscribers in “the downtown metro areas of 9 top cities” at some point during the “first half of 2019”, with an aim of providing “contiguous coverage using the first 5G smartphone in the US.”
Of course, Sprint plans to release several 5G-enabled handsets in the near future, including at least one new Samsung flagship, while in terms of infrastructure, the eventual completion of a proposed T-Mobile merger would certainly help both operators speed up their rollouts and nationwide expansions.
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