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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

I'd really love if people would stop calling everything mobile standard some number followed by a G.

There are literally no known commercial scale deployments of '5G' technology out there - its largely on paper with many technical and practical details to be worked out - and the deployments discussed even when they do go hot, will be small, literally, these are microcells, something effectively the size of a oversized wifi hotspot. What has been deployed, is effectively LTE-Advanced, with extra channel bonding and MIMO. Beyond that, the 5G standard isn't even finalized yet.

We're still solidly in the '4G' era, and we (in the US) don't even have 100% saturation for LTE coverage, much less LTE-Advanced.

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> I'd really love if people would stop calling everything mobile standard some number followed by a G.

It can be useful to have different labels for the "generations" when they're incompatible. Analog (1G) is incompatible with traditional GSM (2G), which is incompatible with UMTS (3G), which is incompatible with LTE (4G). So if your new network only has 4G but your old phone only has 2G and 3G, you know it won't work and you have to buy a new phone.

There are pretty substantial differences between AMPS and NMT, GSM and CDMA, EV-DO and EDGE.

CDMA for example was designed to evolve from AMPS (so was D-AMPS or TDMA, which was another 2g technology), so you could put CDMA and Analog carriers in the same site infrastructure. The 'nG' label is virtually meaningless is most discussions. It also leaves out discussion of PHS, and others, which were clearly 2g technologies.

Something like 99.98% of people would have no idea what "3GPP rev14" is.

As a person who works in the industry: There are pretty much no actual 5G systems in use. There are carriers in the US building microcell sized, DAS type LTE-Advanced things on utility poles and similar.

As usual, it's technical jargon used for marketting purpose. That's why they don't use it responsably, and that's why geeks complain without realizing the goal is not to be right, but to make money.

But aren't 4G, 5G etc. not actually marketing terms that on a technical level only imply some broad capabilities (e.g. possible download rate > X MBit/s), while the actual standards providing those are not called 4G/5G?

> Confusion has been caused by some mobile carriers who have launched products advertised as 4G but which according to some sources are pre-4G versions, commonly referred to as '3.9G', which do not follow the ITU-R defined principles for 4G standards, but today can be called 4G according to ITU-R.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#IMT-Advanced_requirements

4G is defined in an ITU paper basically. And telcos started to use it for networks that were pretty far from 4G. Then ITU simply said, that okay, sure, use that, because they don't care.

Well, complaining is not the problem, the problem is that usually people here preach to the choir.

HN should seek out and submit high quality precisely communicated pages about the concrete instance of "news" that the fluffpages post. But instead all we get is the complaining.

While I agree that 5G standard is still not finalized, in Qatar Ericsson will start deploying 5G gNodeBs starting by end of Q2. Nokia is modernizing the core network to a fully virtualize one and intercompatibility is mostly solved in this network.

It's usually a cat-and-mouse game, with some commercial deployments solidifying some portions of the standards, while themselves accommodating other portions of the standards from other networks as the technology matures in the upcoming years.

It depends if you’re talking daily conversation or technical. For daily use, ?G is great. Imagine how confused layman people would be if the top left of their phone alternatingly showed GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSPA, LTE or LTE-A depending on their connection. What the hell do all these things mean? And which was better than which again? 1-4G communicates much clearer that ‘this is faster/less delay/more stable’.

> Imagine how confused layman people would be if the top left of their phone alternatingly showed GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSPA, LTE or LTE-A depending on their connection

I don't know what kind of phone you have, but I have seen 2G. H, E, LTE and LTE+ in the top bar of my phone quite often.

I thought there are some public tests already, and phones that already support it.

Perhaps? It's not really mainstream technology, and it's like two years from actual rollout.

Calling them V4.0, Version5, 4G, or 5th Generation isn't the largest issue with cellphone technologies...

I thought it's live in South Korea?

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