AT&T’s 5G false start backfires

The attempt by US operator AT&T to rebrand LTE-A as 5Ge has quite rightly left it open to ridicule.

It was never in any doubt that a US operator would jump the gun regarding 5G this year, it was just a matter of who. The geniuses in AT&T’s marketing department decided it should be them and, while the rest of us were opening Christmas presents and falling asleep in front of Bond films, they were plotting how to claim 5G victory without actually serving up any 5G.

Inspired, perhaps, by the best wireless technology currently available on the AT&T network, their hours of brainstorming yielded the word ‘evolution’. If you stick a little ‘e’ after 5G, they apparently reasoned, then you’re basically saying it’s nearly 5G. Closer to 5G, in fact, than 4G, so putting 5G on phones is totally justified. Essentially AT&T is saying it has the most evolved 4G.

Not only has the entirety of the telecoms and tech press been merciless in calling bullshit on this risible move, but AT&T’s main competitors have wasted little time in taking the piss. Verizon CTO Kyle Malady was moved to publish an opportunistic piece entitled ‘When we say “5G,” we mean 5G’.

“We’re calling on the broad wireless industry to commit to labelling something 5G only if new device hardware is connecting to the network using new radio technology to deliver new capabilities,” he said. “Verizon is making this commitment today: We won’t take an old phone and just change the software to turn the 4 in the status bar into a 5. We will not call our 4G network a 5G network if customers don’t experience a performance or capability upgrade that only 5G can deliver.”

As you might expect, T-Mobile US was much less restrained in its response. CEO John Legere collated some of the media dismissals of the move and shared them on Twitter. His marketing department warmed to the theme and posted a video of someone putting ‘9G’ sticker over the top of the network notification display in the top right of an iPhone, to ridicule the cosmetic nature of this AT&T initiative.

The sad thing is that this probably won’t harm AT&T. Yes it looks ridiculous now, but if there’s no such thing as bad publicity then AT&T seems to be getting a fair bit of it. That could change, however, if this move becomes a ‘quirky’ at the end of mainstream news bulletins. If AT&T consequently becomes synonymous with marketing incompetence and duplicity, then that old axiom will be put to the test.