Comcast says it represents a 10 Gigabit cable internet network they are building (it doesn’t exist) so they are basically changing the meaning of the g from generation to gig to act like 10g is 5 generations better (or twice as fast)…or that they have a 10 gigabit network. Neither is accurate. It’s still just cable internet that people have to use because they have no other option.
Fuck Comcast.
I read online they are abandoning the “confusing” 10g branding but I just saw a commercial for it. They think all of their customers are morons and count on folks having no other choices in a lot of cases.
Apologies to anyone outside the United States, this is just complaining about our poor internet options and deceptive advertising by greedy corporations.
Also, why was 4G called LTE but not 3G or 5G?
It depends on the carrier. I’m on AT&T’s network, and they have parts of the network that they labeled “4G” and parts that they labeled “LTE.”
The simplest answer is to Google what your carrier considers LTE, 3G, and 4G speeds. Some carriers consider LTE to be their “4G,” some carriers have networks labeled 4G and LTE, some carriers consider LTE to be 3G+, some consider 4G to be 3G+ … it’s all a big mess, it depends on what the marketing team decided to label the network hardware, and every carrier has different definitions for the same terms.
It’s all mostly a marketing speak.
LTE is a proper name for the latest flavour of a wireless connectivity steandard. It simply means ‘long-term evolution’, because naming it after the actual underlying algorithms would be ‘orthogonal frequency-division with multiple access’ was too long even for nerds who created that standard, and also it uses simpler frequency-division with multiple access for transmitting data from your phone to the cell tower, so the actual proper name would be ‘OFDMA uplink FDMA downlink’.
And 5G is still mostly LTE, just with extra radio channels and an optional millimeter frequency support.
There were similarly several 3G technologies - HSDPA, HSPA+, DC-HSDPA, DC-HSDPA w/MIMO, each offering a better speed, but that would be confusing, so the operators just named everything as 3G.
So it’s like saying 802.11 instead of Wifi?
Kind of, yeah.
There are WiFi setups that can cover as far as 10 km range, which is firmly inside 4G territory, with a speed to match.