Telecoms marketeers have long played it fast and loose with techie terminology and, if this week’s news is anything to go by, it’s a practice that is not likely to die out any time soon.
Ömer Fatih Sayan, the new head of Turkey’s telecom regulator BTK, this week announced the completion of the country’s 4.5G mobile spectrum auction.
4.5G?
Anyone else having flashbacks to 2010, and certain U.S. operators that badged HSPA+ services as 4G in a bid to convince consumers of their lightning speed?
It seems a similar thing is happening in Turkey, albeit at a national rather than operator level…although the spectrum winners aren’t entirely innocent either, with Turkcell, Vodafone and Avea all touting 4.5G services on their Websites.
Turkey’s 4G auction, as we prefer to call it, eventually took place on Wednesday, having been delayed for three months after the country’s president Tayyip Erdogan threw the entire process into doubt in April when he called for Turkey to skip the fourth generation of mobile and move straight to 5G. That alone could explain why the whole nation is jumping on the 4.5G bandwagon.
Turkcell was the big spender, committing €1.62 billion of the €3.36 billion raised to secure frequencies in all available bands: 800 MHz, 900 MHz, 1800 MHz, 2.1 GHz and 2.6 GHz.
A spokesman for the company explained to Total Telecom that the new frequencies, plus carrier aggregation technology, will enable Turkcell to offer mobile broadband at speeds of up to 375 Mbps.
But while a number of mobile operators outside of Turkey have also pitched LTE-Advanced (carrier aggregation) as 4.5G, that doesn’t make it so. And indeed, many prefer the term 4G+.
The vendor community, always happy to get another ‘G’ under its belt, is keen to make sure there is another technology step between 4G and the as-yet undefined but much-discussed 5G.
Huawei has been particularly vocal over the past 12 months about the need for an interim step between 4G and 5G. The Chinese vendor believes we need 4.5G to support the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile applications that are no longer smartphone-based.
4.5G will allow for up to 100,000 connections per cell, latency of less than 10 milliseconds, and speeds of up to 1 Gbps over mobile networks, Huawei says. It predicts the first commercial deployments will take place next year.
Turkey’s determination to describe mobile broadband services as 4.5G is little more than marketing hype, but the operators are looking ahead to that 1 Gbps milestone.
The new spectrum allocations will allow Turkcell to reach 1 Gbps "as technology develops," our spokesman said.
Whether or not 4.5G will ever really ‘exist’ really comes down to whether end-users adopt the terminology. There will doubtless be many new technology developments before we get to 5G mobile services, but it’s questionable whether they really need half a ‘G’ all of their own.
