RANT: More Mobile Trash & Gross Misinterpretation of "4G" Continues!

So the phone industry continues to amaze me in very creative ways. One of my expertise is getting into heated discussions with the "experts" in the phone industry. It's quite an oxymoron to call them "experts" considering that their main job is to sell their products to the consumer. Similar to a crooked salesman at a used car lot in Virginia Beach (up to 37% interest!), the purpose is to entrap the customer into a plan and convince them that their network is the best. Of course, we can pin this premise with most sales-people, but unlike that used car salesman, little to nothing is being done to keep the phone companies in check. It all comes down to the honesty of the salesman, and there are quite a few who are aware of the malicious tactics that are used to hook in Johnny/Jane E. Dumbass to getting their "4G" iPhone 4 (which is NOT 4G....at all), and ridiculously priced plan. Take those salesmen away and you're left with the rest of the circus. The ones who keep prodding your back until you produce some plastic (or some Federal Reserve Notes). One of the main staples to this campaign is their network. Sprint took the upper hand early and introduced their WiMax network as the first functioning 4G network in the country. This was followed by T-Mobile using HSPA+, AT&T also releasing HSPA+, and Verizon releasing LTE. All services releasing 4G networks.. all services false advertising! As I stated here, none of these networks are actual 4G networks. They're all precursors to the standard, but they ALL fall short of the projected target of 100MBits download / 50MBits upload speed (which is indeed faster than most broadband internet speed) that is suppose to be the standard. At first impression, it's not a big deal. These current speeds are still faster than their labeled 3G counterparts. Looking further into the matter reveals a gross misinterpretation scheme design to trick the people into thinking that these networks are actually 4G.

Ryan... This Again?
Hey, the way I see it, this is your money. You're buying into what they say regardless if you think otherwise. Having that mindset, would you be thinking about what you bought yourself into? I sure as hell did. A couple days later, I had to blog my findings. To briefly summarize, HSPA+, WiMax, and LTE are considered anywhere between 3.5 - 3.9G. In reality, .5 and .9 are just loose terms to describe that they're above the standard 3G specs. All networks fall under what is called the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project). These networks all have ties to the much older GSM and CDMA (think Moto RAZR days) networks, but the point is that in order for the network to be qualified as an actual 4G network, the standard needed to be submitted to the International Telecommunications Union and it needed to meet the IMT-Advanced (fancier way of saying 4G) standard. For mobiles, the target is 100Mbits d/l and 50Mbits u/l. In a nutshell, the best that this nation can do is 37Mbits (Verizon LTE), therefore, the fastest network in the US doesn't meet the 4G standard. The only country on Earth that has exceeded the target is Japan with their LTE-Advanced standard. Regardless to this, the companies see their networks as 4G and markets them under a false flag.

This may not seem to be a big deal considering that we do have considerably faster data speeds than the last standard, but because of their marketing campaign, they used the premise of "4G speeds" as an excuse to do things like take away unlimited plans (AT&T, Verizon unless you're using an iPhone), limit connectivity speeds, and even data caps for dedicated internet services (like AT&T's U-Verse). None of these catches were present in the past, and people overlook the fact that this is being done in the name of that false flag. Another thing that they love to do is limit the capabilities of their phones. No, i'm not talking locked phones. Rooting and jailbreaking are completely legal (as per federal ruling), but you do risk a void of warranty on your current device. I'm talking about limitations within certain component software and device drivers...and I have the evidence to prove it.

RADIO Y U NO WORK!?!?
There is one major advantage to Rooting a phone: the ability to flash your radio antenna and the driver controller (RIL). Some Radios work better in different regions and different phones. Of course, there are limitations, and there are risks (being that you can brick the phone.), but if you do it right, you may have your device work much better. I have a HTC Inspire 4G using HSPA+ w/enhanced backhaul (fancy term for "faster"). On the status bar, it has always said "H+" above my reception gauge. Over the summer, I rooted my Inspire and installed the very useful Cyanogenmod 7 OS into the device. After the installation, I noticed that my status bar was only indicated with just "H" and I wondered if this was a result of the OS being meant for the HTC Desire HD (a near identical version of the Inspire). When I figured out why changing the Radio and RIL could be beneficial to me, I decided to change the radio back to the stock ATT OTA radio provided with an official update released back in April. After installing it, I set it up for a series of Speedtest benchmarks and this was the result:

Note: The bottom 3 benchmarks are from the radio/RIL provided with the Cyanogenmod7 OS. The top 3 is the ATT OTA stock combo 4/29/2011. 

As you can see, the speed difference is considerably noticeable. Also note, that the ATT OTA stock release was meant to unlock the HSUPA that was not present when the Inspire was released. The considerably large upload speed is present.

After seeing these speeds, I knew there was something fishy about AT&T's handling of their network. The CM7 radio wasn't even meant for AT&T's network (T-Mobile), and it was [mostly] dunking on this radio. In fact, AT&T recently updated the Inspire to have the new version of Android (2.3...already had it :P) and a new radio/RIL. Guess what? Word on the street is that the radio is worse and both the operating system and Radio/RIL is consuming more battery power. Anyway, the other major thing that I noticed was that the "H" did not turn back to "H+"after I installed the stock radio in. Basically this told me that AT&T altered the code (since Android is open-source) in order for the connection to show "H+." Of course, I changed the radio again and I upgraded it to 26.08.03.07_M, and this was the result:

Top 3 is the new Radio, and bottom 3 is the ATT OTA stock.

These results are much better (obviously). Later results indicated that speeds were constantly between 1.1MBits - 3.9MBits d/l and 900Kbps - 1Mbits u/l which is still not fast (as opposed to the 8 - 11MBits+ you get on the west coast), but for Hawai'i, it'll do.

Now I'm even wondering how much of difference it would make when an actual HSPA+ network is in place on the island because these speeds are no different to the very 3G iPhone 4.