AT&T is lying about 4G. Shamelessly. The company's two "4G" phones and its "4G" modem don't deliver 4G even by AT&T's own wishy-washy standards. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as the 4G police, and AT&T is going to get away with debasing the term and confusing consumers to everyone's disadvantage.
First of all, 4G is close to meaningless anyway. Initially the International Telecommunications Union defined 4G as a bunch of super-fast technologies nobody has yet, but the ITU crumbled under pressure from various cell phone companies and now defines 4G as, basically, any cellular Internet network that's faster than what was considered the fastest technology in 2009.
So we're seeing a wide variety in 4Gs here in the USA. Verizon has the closest to what most people would think of as real 4G. Verizon's LTE is a brand-new technology that's faster than most home Internet connections. But just to confuse you, MetroPCS has LTE too - but MetroPCS's 4G LTE can be slower than AT&T's 3G, because MetroPCS designed its network for low monthly plan costs rather than high speeds.
And you could argue that almost everyone has lied a little here. T-Mobile has two "4G" phones, the myTouch 4G and T-Mobile G2, which (while excellent) use a technology (HSPA 14.4) that T-Mobile later said isn't 4G. MetroPCS's Samsung Craft phone, while it uses LTE, gets lower apparent speeds than many other carriers' 3G smartphones because it has a slow processor and a relatively primitive Web browser.
AT&T has reached a new low, though, by delivering "4G" devices that are actually slower than the carrier's own 3G devices. Yes, you read it correctly: for AT&T, 4G is a step backwards. In the past few weeks we've compared two AT&T "4G" phones and an AT&T "4G" modem against a few 3G devices.
AT&T recently confirmed it is crippling the upload speeds on its two 4G phones, the Motorola Atrix and HTC Inspire. We also found slow upload speeds on the Shockwave 4G USB modem, although that may be a network rather than a device-based issue. Meanwhile, we got considerably faster speeds than the Atrix and Inspire on the Apple iPhone 4 and Dell Venue, both of which are supposedly "3G." We aren't seeing much faster download speeds on the 4G devices, either.
Why is AT&T doing this? I'm not sure. It could be that the network can't handle the strain. It could be that all of the devices have some horrible bug in the upload firmware. AT&T isn't saying.
Supposedly, the 4G phones will be upgraded to actually support 4G speeds in the future. That's great, but they shouldn't have been advertised as 4G until they did.
The carrier puts all sorts of stupid little fine print in its ads, trying to legally indemnify itself against the fact that its current 4G claim is totally worthless. But that doesn't balance out the fact that these phones are being advertised with 4G in the name, and if you stand in the same place with a "4G" phone and a "3G" phone on the same network, the 3G phone will be faster.
This is especially a pity because AT&T was doing a good job repairing the rips the iPhone caused in its 3G network. AT&T admitted it had a problem, faced up to it, and worked hard to fix it. Yes, the work came too late - AT&T should have prepared properly for the iPhone rather than fixing things after the fact - but for a while, there had been some clear honesty coming out of the carrier about what it needed to do to make things right.
AT&T's lies debase the concept of 4G in general, but maybe that's the point. AT&T has the fastest 3G network, as we showed in our 18-city tests last year. But Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile are all significantly ahead of AT&T on delivering 4G or 4G-ish devices. Since it's behind, AT&T's tactic seems to ruin the entire idea of 4G so as to cloud the picture. It'll be interesting to see whether the company has to backpedal, or repair customers' confused perceptions when it actually gets a network that's up to speed.
I'm pretty hopeless about there being a remedy for this. Sure, there are Internet petitions and potential class action lawsuits going around, but 4G at this point is such a meaningless term that I can't see them having much success. The HTC Inspire and Motorola Atrix are still two of the best phones on AT&T, and I still recommend them. But are they 4G? Not for now.