UPDATE: Sprint Is Suing AT&T for Misleading "5G" Service Advertisements

UPDATE: AT&T has reached out with a statement:

“We understand why our competitors don’t like what we are doing, but our customers love it. We introduced 5G Evolution more than two years ago, clearly defining it as an evolutionary step to standards-based 5G. 5G Evolution and the 5GE indicator simply let customers know when their device is in an area where speeds up to twice as fast as standard LTE are available. That’s what 5G Evolution is, and we are delighted to deliver it to our customers.

We will fight this lawsuit while continuing to deploy 5G Evolution in addition to standards-based mobile 5G. Customers want and deserve to know when they are getting better speeds. Sprint will have to reconcile its arguments to the FCC that it cannot deploy a widespread 5G network without T-Mobile while simultaneously claiming in this suit to be launching ‘legitimate 5G technology imminently.”

After being called out for displaying 5G service on devices without 5G capabilities, AT&T is being sued by Sprint for falsely advertising LTE services as 5G on iPhones. Sprint describes the advertisement as deceptive at best, noting in its suit that “The significance of AT&T’s deception cannot be overstated.”

So is AT&T doing that thing where they change the definition of a service they already provide and call it something close to the next gen service name? What is 5GE? Is it any different than 4G LTE? pic.twitter.com/hKBbc6HbpL

— Kyle Comeau (@KAComeau) January 7, 2019

AT&T is attempting to describe the “E” in the 5G E service it’s displaying on devices stands for “evolution,” implying the service as a half-measure of the official 5G wireless service the company plans to implement at some point in the future. However, 5G E is just a conflated 4G gigabit LTE. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson told CNBC Friday morning that the company feels “very comfortable” with the “5G E” namesake. “We’ve done our [homework] around how we characterize this,” Stephenson stated.

In other tech news, Apple will compensate the teen who found the recent FaceTime bug.

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