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Do not trust the icon. Image: AT & T
It's hard to switch to 5G. To achieve this, we need a lot of infrastructure, devices and upgrades. But it seems that in its quest to be the first or the best or something, the US AT & T carrier is collecting dubious shortcuts to make the 5G appear earlier than expected.
plans to replace the "4G LTE" icon on some Android phones with an "5G E" icon, although these devices are not connected to a real 5G network.
• The 5G is already on trial in the United States, but remains
• They were finally able to build 5G antennas that fit in a smartphone
In a description on the website of AT & T, the company tries to explain this meaningless update by saying: "5G Evolution (5G E) is our first step on the road to 5G Our improvements already allow faster speeds on our existing LTE network . "The essential of this sentence is the use of" existing LTE ", which refers to the 4G LTE, not to the 5G.
AT & T justifies this change by saying that its 5G E service is enhanced by features such as 4X4 MIMO, which increases the total number of antennas used to send and receive data, and 256 QAM, technique used to increase the effective bandwidth of a single channel or signal. And although these elements can provide faster data speeds, in the end it still does not allow the 5G E to be identical to the real 5G.
To make things even more confusing, the 5G E is just one of three different 5G markers that AT & T plans to use. The operator also intends to adopt a common "5G" icon and a "5G +" icon, the latter indicating the use of millimetric frequency bands such as AT & T adopted in a handful of cities that received the current 5G service.
One of the reasons AT & T can do this is that, in part, 5G is nebulously defined, with "G" being used to indicate the evolution towards fifth-generation wireless networks. The true 5G definition used by most operators is based on the 5G NR standard, which specifies the use of a more advanced structure including mmWave (millimeter wave) radios and extended frequency support for speeds greater than one gigabit per second [19659003] Unfortunately, this is not the first time a mobile operator has tried to claim that its network is better than it actually is. Previously, in the run-up to 4G LTE, several carriers, including AT & T, T-Mobile, and Sprint, rated networks using WiMax or HSPA + as 4G, whereas in reality they did not. were not. (Although the fate is strange, some of these standards were subsequently corrected to meet the criteria required to meet 4G LTE standards.)
It is not yet clear which phones will be subject to the icon change But, in a statement to FierceWireless, AT & T said: "At first, we will launch this operation in a handful of devices, with more devices displaying the indicator at spring of 2019. "
In addition, as there is still no phone ready for the La 5G on the market, if you start seeing operators talk about upgrading your service to 5G on a phone that you have owned for a while, we suggest suspecting. This is not just because there is an icon saying "5G E" that your data service has really gotten better.
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