Peter, you said it. 22 years in the telecom industry, and off-late I am seeing a lot of confusing marketing techniques. 3G, 4G, LTE, WIMAX are buzz words continuously hammered on the consumers. That is why I like cable companies. Atleast they say, here this is your broadband connection, now tell me what speed you want. I hope they stay that track.

"3G vs. 4G: Who cares?"

I care.
I have been using 4G LTE since 2009 and I get 80Mbps download speed in real world usage.
Old 3G gets 30-40Mbps download speed.

Wimax gets average download speeds 3-6 Mbps.
http://shop.sprint.com/en/stores/popups/4G_coverage_popup.shtml

Wimax speeds of 3-6Mbps did I have 5-6 years ago
OMG so slow it was, and what bad latency.

Who wants Wimax today when 4G LTE has 80Mbps and 5-10ms of latency?

Where is this Commercial LTE deployment that your getting 80Mbs from?

When a company has a competing product that is 3-10 times faster than the current 3G wireless standard, it SHOULD be differentated from its competition. Both from a marketing and user expecatation perspective.
If you cannot see the difference in the two, maybe you shouldn't be writing for a technology site!
As to the anonymous user who claims theyre using LTE at 80 megabytes, they are either on another continent or woefully misunderstood.
The average 3g connection is good for about a single megabyte download. I tested my 4g connection this week and 4.76 meg down and 1.21 meg up.
If thats not worth touting and does not create seperation from carriers, what will?

Holy LTE shill, Batman! Comparing theoretical data rates for HSPA+ and LTE with real-world WiMAX data rates. How apples-n-oranges of you. And if you were using LTE in 2009, then you were one of the handpicked few on TeliaSonera's network who got one of the limited LTE modems. And that means you likely were not using a WiMAX network because you had no WiMAX coverage. Oh snap!

I'm calling some major bs on the 80 mbps.. just not happening.

There is only one commercial launch of LTE and that is NOT in the US. There are always Fan Boys of all technologies, and you probably carry an iphone also. Both WiMax and LTE are screeming fast when you test them under lab conditions and on minimally loaded networks because they are 95% the same under the "hood". The difference is LTE's technology ecosystem is not fully baked regardless of what gets deployed. Look at http://www.Wimaxforum.org , and try to find anything close to that level of development for LTE. LTE doesn't even have the Patent Pools and licensing agreements worked out and the deployment by Verizon will be completely proprietary. I Agree 4G is a marketing term as is 3G, however, WiMax and LTE both are separate and new networks/technologies and therefore are the next generation of wireless technology and will carry the industry forward, and that is the next generation of wireless regardless of your criteria. The real challenge is spectrum availability and only one carrier is well positioned in that arena.

I'm willing to bet that "Mr. 80Mbps" works for Ericsson.

80Mbps? I wonder if you know the difference between dreaming and reality there champ. While LTE works out there kinks...Wimax is increasing their strength. When LTE finally does decide to deploy..Wimax will have already deployed all throughout the nation. AT&T already changed their data service to pay per usage...what makes you not wonder if LTE will also be a pay per usage service?

“Where is this Commercial LTE deployment that your getting 80Mbs from?”

TeliaSonera.
Real world download speed:
”optimala lägen nå upp till 80 Mbit/s.”
Peak speed:
100 Mbit/s.
http://telia4g.se/?p=57

But the low latency is the killer app.
“LTE download speeds in Norway and Sweden, which can be 10x faster than those achieved with 3G, was the best feature of the technology, but it was the lower latency that made customers go "wow".”
http://www.fiercewireless.com/europe/story/teliasonera-reduced-latency-what-sells-lte/2010-06-09

Why are you so sensitive about trucks? Trucks are perfectly fine. In fact, I know several reputable people who drive them...even analysts. Trucks are what built this country. Keep on trucking man.

Telia 4G bandwidth test - take 2 firmware upgrade
Real world speed:
90Mbps
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycwe8foyfco&feature=related

Peter, two important things were left out of your analysis. Regarding spectrum allocation, it is critical for scale that regulators come to agreement on what bands will be supported for what technologies. otherwise you will have multi-mode, multi-frequencies, multi-technologies in about 10 different flavors. Without scale, consumers cannot enjoy decent pricing of devices or services. And of course without good coverage -- indoor and outdoors, consumers will get nothing whether it is 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G and I'm sure someone is already talking about 5G. But this is nothing new...it's been this way since the late 1980s when people were discussing N-AMPS v. TDMA v CDMA.

The ITU has actually been discouraging the use of 4G. The important thing in ITU is the setting of Radio Regulations that give guidance to national regulatory bodies on how to deploy radio spectrum. IMT is a very good example of a succesful establishment of a global framework on spectrum for mobile communications. Most countries with the exception of the USA are harmonized on the core IMT band on and around 2000 MHz. Today both LTE and WiMAX are IMT-2000 radio technologies (in addition to the older ones such as cdma2000 and WCDMA).

From ITU point of view, there is no spectrum set separately for IMT-2000 or IMT-Advanced. All of the spectrum identified in the Radio Regulations for IMT is for "IMT-2000 and IMT-Advanced", and this was agreed already at World Radio Conference 2007. Granted, a national regulator could limit what radio technologies would be deployed in any given band, since they do have the final authority in their respective nations. This could bring about the question whether e.g. HSPA+ is on par with LTE-A and 802.16m, should a regulator take IMT-Advanced focused bias.

Highly likely...

I'm willing to bet that "Mr. 80Mbps" works for Ericsson.

HIGHLY LIKELY!

My TeliaSonera 4G LTE download speed is in the range of 20-80Mbps, and latency is in the 10-20ms range.
When I dont have 4G connection it falls back to good old 3G in the download speed of 10-17Mbps.
Mark Smith

Thanks everyone for all the great comments. Seems I've somehow touched a nerve - though some of this may be from confusion around my points.

My point was not that there are not meaningful differences between technologies being called 3G and 4G. My point was simply that people who are obsessed with whether or not today's versions of WiMAX and LTE are missing the fundamental point that 4G is simply a marketing term. To specific questions and points...

1. FiveStar - what's the technology that's delivering 3-10 times the performance of 3G? WiMAX? LTE? If so, then it's not officially 4G. That's exactly my point. If the term "4G" conveys a bump in performance then it will get (and should be) used whether or not its technically accurate.
2. Anonymous - I currently drive a truck, a 1993 Chevy S-10. Chalk up my high school sensitivities to being stupid.
3. Jane - you're right about spectrum, unfortunately there's only so much you can say in 1000 words or so. That said, it's somewhat tangential to my point. As ITU Angle points out, spectrum has been set aside for IMT-2000 and IMT-Advanced. Do you see regulators saying, "you can't deploy LTE in x band - you need to wait for true 4G?"? I don't. As far as fragmentation goes, get used to it. With refarming taking place in some places, it's going to happen.

LTE and 4G were defined as 100MBs throughput on the downlink and 50MB on the reverse link, with a latency of 10ms.

Until we reach that speed, regardless of theoretical speeds, or real world speed... until we are hitting those numbers, I say we call it 3g.

The difference between 1g and 2g (Analog to TDMA/CDMA/GSM/GPRS) was substantial, as was 2g (TDMA/CDMA/GSM/GPRS) to 3g (EvDO, UMTS, HSPA).

At this point, WiFi is closer to 4g if the network through put is there from the ISP. Maybe Linksys and Netgear should offer their routers as 4g?

Peter, yes, as another wireless analyst I often grapple with this as you must. The way that I have gotten around the problem, if you will, is to not use "4G" as a technical term representing any particular technology, but instead use it in the generic sense to represent a faster technology than 3G. Otherwise, if I'm talking about LTE of WiMAX, I just say LTE or WiMAX. That, of course, doesn't prevent our marketing people from following the "hype bandwagon" and often LTE and WiMAX get changed to "4G" for the same reasons that operators use, but at least its a partial solution where I can be accurate in my mind, but still not contradict the rest of the world driven by marketing hype and large wireless operator marketing budgets.

A also think it is a shame that operators have gone to this level, in what I'm sure can mislead customers, but I guess I'm not surprised. As usual, "buyer beware" when you actually be buying slower data speeds with "4G" than you received with some "3G."

And very good article, by the way.

stockholm, olso

@anonymous 6:53 Not to fit too delicately into your nerd pigeonhole, but dude, you misspelled "looser". 5 demerits.

Liked most of your points otherwise.

I've been following this for a while and think it's fairly funny. Not the original commentary - I could go either way on that. Rather, the responses that seem to have been written by people who read only the title or every other word of the piece.
The final "anonymous" is a good example. So, just to ask a few questions for Mr. Anonymous...
- Did you manage to pass high school English? If so, how do you interpret, "...it's unclear where the real issue lies" as meaning that the author cares about the technical use of 4G?
- Grade school English? If so, why do you respond to, "4G is a marketing term...marketers will use it as they see fit. If that helps consumers better understand the capabilities of a service, all the better" with, "marketing takes techno dork terms and turns it into something that will actually entice consumers to buy. thats a good thing." You can't see that the points are pretty similar?
3. Are the "shift" and "caps lock" keys on your keyboard broken?
4. You choose to pick on Mr. Jarich for personal reasons and focus on what he thought back in high school? You couldn't do any better? How about his Eddie Munster-like haircut? Oh wait, you're probably bald, aren't you?

As has been expressed, it's mostly about marketing hype. Maybe your experience of pedantically clinging to perceptions is the problem.
My feeling is: if it was an old Blazer (the full sized versions from before your '93 S-10 style), it WAS a truck. It was built on a pickup tuck chassis and had the same drive-train and front sheet metal. Just because the 'bed' was covered and the rear cabin wall was removed doesn't make it a car.
As far as 3G/4G, I don't really care as long as I can get coverage and reasonable speed.

WiMax is what I'm using. I've been in the industry in technical/sales roles for over 15 years with 2 different carriers.
I've been selling data since the cdpd and mobitex days.
The key point I was trying to make is that regardless of what you call it, having a game changing product (at least for today) in Wimax is a differentiator and needs to be marketed as such.

At teh risk of making this a philosophical and introspective discussion - the real question here is 'what is a G?' or perhaps 'what warrants the identification of a new 'g'?'.

The problem is that with going from 2G to 3G, all the changes happened at once. There was a technology change (TDM to CDMA), there was service paradigm shift (voice to data, or at least that was the perception even if the reality took a while to catch up), and there was an ITU process (IMT-2000) to bundle it all up into.

This time around there is a blurring of the lines. For those in the 'technology shift' camp there is the move from CDMA to OFDMA and hence, a nice neat line that puts HSPA, HSPA+, EV-DO on one side, and LTE and WiMAX on the other. The ITU process camp however, will point at IMT-Advanced and draw the line between HSPA, EV-DO, WiMAX and LTE on one side and then LTE-Advanced and WiMAX 2 on the other. The service model camp (for which I am going to generalise the name to 'marketing professionals') are a bit stumped because there is no shift - it goes from 'pretty damned fast data without wires' to 'even faster data without wires'... but as HSPA+ moves up the data rates with QAM16, MIMO and Multi carrier, the line pretty damned fast and even faster is difficult to find.

So you're all right and you're all wrong too. Just depends who you are having the discussion over a beer with. And it is an entire introvert conversation anyway... the one line that I spotted that makes sense is 'As far as 3G/4G, I don't really care as long as I can get coverage and reasonable speed'. The customer knows what matters - the right speed, where they want to use on the right kind of devices and the right price. Those of you that know me will know what I think the right answer for that is, so I am not going to go there because that will be whole other thread.

Got a pic of your 4G Chevy Blazer?

Nokia buys Motorola Wireless. Why does Moto sell? because they see that Wimax is dead.
4G are all LTE.
RIP Wimax.