An AT&T spokesman today told PCMAG.com that the carrier's current HSPA+ rollout will be faster than the 14.4 Mbps AT&T promised in the past, rebutting recent claims by rival T-Mobile.

According to AT&T, the company is currently rolling out a system that is faster than HSPA+ 14.4 because it uses 64 QAM modulation.

But here's the confusing part: AT&T didn't use any speed number in its statement, such as calling its network HSPA+ 21 or HSPA+ 42. Commonly, most HSPA+ rollouts are described with the term HSPA+ and a maximum theoretical speed in megabits.

This is all very odd. Sixty-four QAM modulation is a key part of the HSPA+ 21 spec; that's the network T-Mobile is using now. The slower HSPA+ 14.4 system uses 16 QAM modulation. So is AT&T trying to say that it's installing HSPA+ 21 without saying it? I'm confused, and the company is not clarifying further. Instead, AT&T gave me this statement:

"T-Mobile's claims about 4G are based on the same HSPA+ technology we have deployed to 180M people today, more than T-Mobile's reported 140M, and we'll have it rolled out to 250M people by the end of this month, substantially more than the 200M T-Mobile says it will have by year end."

If AT&T is indeed installing HSPA+ 21 right now, that's a change in plan. AT&T first announced an HSPA+ 14.4 upgrade in May, followed by the announcement of the carrier's first HSPA+ compatible device, the USBConnect Shockwave, in October. At last month's 4G World trade show, an AT&T spokeswoman told Light Reading that the carrier had not yet begun deploying HSPA+ 21.

The subtext here is a battle over the marketing term "4G," which was recently rendered effectively meaningless for the next few years when the International Telecommunication Union announced that nothing any U.S. carrier is rolling out is officially 4G. Yesterday, T-Mobile declared that its HSPA+ 21 network is 4G and that AT&T's HSPA+ 14.4 network supposedly isn't.

We look forward to further perplexing battles over the definition of 4G as the year rolls on.