The legal challenge from Sprint regarding AT&T’s “5GE” branding continues to be a source of confusion and misinformation, reports The Verge. According to AT&T, their marketing of “5G Evolution” is clearly not an attempt to claim that they are delivering 5G service. Consumers appear to think otherwise.
The confusion starts with the fact that AT&T has continued to display “5GE” on their cell phone screens. Mark Benioff, CEO of tech company SalesForce saw the logo and tweeted: “Does this mean I’m now on 5G in San Francisco with 10 Gigabits with super low latency? My phone doesn’t have a 5G chipset but it reads 5G. I saw real 5G last week South Korea and it was astonishing. 100,000 antennas and 10,000 servers connected to a 5G core. Who knows the answer?”
Verge editors were not impressed with AT&T’s explanations or their service. They posit that AT&T has been intentionally cloudy in their marketing efforts when what they are currently offering is their LTE network technology flying under a false flag.
The editors further pondered how AT&T will explain 5G when it actually is available, sarcastically commenting, “it will be a real challenge to boast to customers about next-gen network deployment after spending months tricking those same users into thinking that network has already arrived.”
May 7, 2019
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