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I was about to say that it was mostly Sprint and (again) AT&T advertising 3G as 4G, and for example Verizon had real 4G from the start.

But now as I think, I remember that Verizon had 4G that was capped to about 1mbps in certain areas and then gradually speed increased per area.

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That was a bit of a mess. Technically, no carrier at the time had a "real" 4G network, according to the ITU- only LTE-Advanced and WiMAX 2 met their definition.

Since the ITU had declared that Sprint's WiMAX network and Verizon's LTE network weren't real 4G, T-Mobile decided that they could call their (just-as-fast-as-early-LTE-networks) HSPA+ network 4G too, and then AT&T was almost forced to follow suit because T-Mobile was advertising how their 4G network was so much bigger than everyone else's.

It should be noted that T-Mobile was the only one set up to deploy DC-HSPA+ at 42mbps peak theoretical. Scratching around 30mbps was around what Verizon could do before congestion set in on band 13. AT&T to the best of my knowledge only had HSPA+ at 21mbps, so it really was way more of a stretch for them to call their network 4G.

So at least, yeah... tmo kinda could have argued it was similar to early '4G' radio technologies on speed alone.

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