Author: Jeremy Horwitz / Source: VentureBeat
AT&T may have flippantly dismissed industry-wide pressure to stop calling its 4G LTE Advanced cellular service “5G Evolution,” but thanks to Sprint, a court will now decide whether the branding is deceptive and harmful. In a federal lawsuit filed yesterday (via Engadget), Sprint claims that AT&T has tricked a majority of surveyed consumers into believing that its 5GE service is at least as good as actual 5G — a perception that’s allegedly harming phone buyers and rival carriers.
The Sprint-AT&T dispute hinges on AT&T’s decision to blur the line between late-stage 4G and early 5G technologies, using the 5G Evolution name and 5GE indicators on certain Android phones and iPhones to flag the devices’ connection to higher-speed 4G towers. AT&T has suggested that the 5GE badge lets a user know that a device is using 4×4 MIMO antennas and dense 256 QAM data transmissions to achieve higher speeds, the “first step on the road to 5G.”
Like Verizon and T-Mobile, Sprint has decried the branding as deceptive, and its lawsuit goes further, claiming actual damages to both AT&T’s consumers and competitors. Describing 5GE as false advertising under federal law, Sprint says that “all other major wireless carriers” have been offering the same features as 5GE under the industry-wide name 4G LTE Advanced, and that AT&T is deceiving customers into…
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