If you're an AT&T Mobile customer, be VERY careful buying a new 5G phone!

[thewayne]

AT&T is putting fake electronic network signal 5G labels on phones that are only 4G. They're justifying this because their 4G network has been upgraded and is faster than a typical 4G LTE network, whatever that means. They did the same shit with 3G phones by labeling them 4G before they'd rolled out 4G across the country.

If your phone display shows that you're connected to a "5Ge" (small caps E) network, you're not connected to a 5G network. AT&T is saying that 5G Evolution will be in over 400 markets by the end of the year, but it's not 5G: it's an upgraded 4G. Actual 5G tech will be in very few markets - it will take a couple of years to roll it out - and I think it will mainly be east coast, but don't quote me on that. And then you have to look at phone upgrades to use 5G.

So yet another great big marketing scam.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/21/18151764/att-5g-evolution-logo-rollout-fake-network

Comments

[silveradept]

...we never did really learn that the bigger bits didn't mean anything from video games, did we?

[thewayne]

We did.  The game developers?  That's another story.  A lot of people are going to be scammed by this.

[silveradept]

Yeah. I'm also not surprised that it's Ma Bell who is doing it, either.

[moonhare]

It doesn’t matter what my phone is capable of here as most of my town is in a Verizon vacuum. I’m lucky to make calls in the house, or even at work, five miles away. And my old phone isn’t capable of WiFi assisted calling.

I use it for texting, mostly, and as a digital ephemera camera.

[thewayne]

For us, prior to them being sucked up by Verizon, we were Alltel-only as they were about the only company that understood that there are actually people who don't live in cities.  Then some judge, in their finite wisdom, decided that Verizon couldn't gobble up all of Alltel as that would be anti-competitive, and in our area gave them to AT&T.  Except in our area AT&T's coverage is epic fail.  Plus, we absolutely do not want to give money to The Death Star, so we switched to Verizon and have maintained good coverage in rural areas. I found WiFi-assisted calling to be pretty horrible and turned it off.  Dunno if it's improved.  Then again, I'm using an older iPhone 6, my wife's 4S is even more ancient but it's going to get replaced in '09.