In this article, AT&T talks about its new ‘5G Evolution’ network which will be coming later this year to about 20 cities and taken advantage of by the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus. The 5G Evolution network is said to be twice as fast as their current 4G LTE speeds. I’ll ruin the surprise and tell you it isn’t 5G. Apparently, AT&T never says they are building a 5G network, they are only making something called 5G Evolution which is supposed to pave the way for their 5G network once the standards are finalized. This 5G Evolution thing isn’t even new technology. Apparently, T-Mobile has been using the same tech for six months but just don’t have the insane marketing department that AT&T has. I’ve written about my issue with this type of marketing recently so I won’t go into too much detail about it, but it definitely shouldn’t be allowed. It’s obviously attempting to mislead people into believing that they have a true 5G network and thus have the fastest speeds. The article mentions something worrying at the end. This is only the beginning; the rest of the companies will probably start pretending they have 5G soon too.
Reading articles like this one make me wonder, at what point does something become false advertising? If companies leave themselves a small amount of wiggle room like tacking evolution onto the name of something, should we allow that? Just because you can say, it’s technically not a lie, doesn’t mean it should be allowed. This reminds me of a time about 10 years ago, when the XBOX 360 came out. There was a big trend on the internet to sell the box that the 360 came in on eBay or some other site for the price of a console. Every posting would say something on the page like, “This is just a box, I am not selling a console.” When you hear stories like that, you think the people who made posts like that are terrible, but we don’t seem to notice that it’s not very different to situations like the one with AT&T.
5 Comments
5/3/2017 06:29:09 pm
This topic is super interesting to me. I use to keep a relatively close eye on developments like these, but not so much anymore. From my understanding, 4G LTE stands for 4th Generation, Long Term Evolution. The "evolution" part means that the network technology can improve over time without having to completely revamp the network's infrastructure. As mentioned in the linked article, Verizon recently did this with their LTE Advanced standard. I think you hit the nail on the head in regards to AT&T misleading customers. It was technically accurate and ethically sound to name the technology LTE Advanced or LTE Pro, but very misleading to call it 5G Evolution. All tI wonder if this all boiled down to trademarking different naming schemes.
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Anita Garcia
5/3/2017 07:31:11 pm
Sean, I share your sentiments, and I wonder why the AT&T team doesn't realize that this is a HUGE problem. Incidents like this is why I think this class is important. In an ideal world, every company, I think, should have an ethics inspector. If ethics is too subjective, at least having someone on a marketing team that can deems claims as truthful or not. Since we don't live in such a world, I think that this class shines light on the reality of human nature and dishonest strategies. Knowing that such things exists make us more enlightened consumers and employers. If each individual is knowledgeable of such things, we can make better choices, and perhaps even ask the right people to elaborate on marketed truthfulness.
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Eliasar Gandara
5/3/2017 07:36:38 pm
Hello,
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Pearce Reinsch
5/5/2017 08:08:12 pm
Hearing about marketing strategies like this always bother me. I've come to believe that these types of marketing campaigns are part of the reason there is such a disconnect between the general public and the tech they use. It's almost like its intentionally misleading just so they sound like they've come out with some awesome new tech just to pull a few new customers. Then, because AT&T did it, all the other carriers will have to start saying they have 5G as well, making the matters worse.
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5/21/2017 01:18:06 am
It makes me so angry that companies do this type of false advertising, and its worse that we fall for it. I believe there needs to be more regulation on marketing strategies and that there should be someone that approves of this before its brainwashed to so many people across the nation.
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