I think the issue was that Sprint started marketing their WiMAX service as 4G. In real-world testing, Sprint's WiMAX service has consistently scored around the same as AT&T and T-Mobile's networks (<a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/221931/4g_wireless_speed_tests_which_is_really_the_fastest.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcworld.com/article/221931/4g_wireless_speed_test...</a>, <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/Fastest-Mobile-Networks-2011" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcmag.com/Fastest-Mobile-Networks-2011</a>). Once Sprint had announced that it had 4G and everyone saw that "4G" meant 2-3Mbps, it was hard for AT&T and T-Mobile to avoid calling their HSPA+ networks "4G" as well. After all, they were providing equivalent speeds to Sprint's "4G" network.<p>The real issue is that there wasn't a good way to label networks that were 2-4x better than their predecessor. EV-DO Rev A achieves around 1Mbps in the real world. As companies (Sprint, really) started rolling out faster wireless technologies, they wanted a way to differentiate them. They were better. If you were a Sprint user with a WiMAX device, you're likely getting 2-3x faster speeds. That's a significant improvement and, frankly, Sprint needed a way to communicate that to users. Of course, that set the bar decently low for 4G - a height that HSPA+ easily surpassed.<p>It would have been good if it had been called 3.5G or 3.75G, but once Sprint had announced it's 2-3Mbps service as "4G", it meant everyone offering 2-3Mbps service had to call it that. Granted, I think Sprint thought its service was going to provide faster speeds than that - as noted by their 3-6Mbps figure. However, that never panned out in real-world testing. It's reasonable to think that LTE's speeds are going to be reduced as the customer load increases (right now, AT&T and Verizon's LTE networks are virtually empty). So, if WiMAX had been able to deliver 3-6Mbps and LTE speeds went down to the 6Mbps range under load, it might not have seemed so off.<p>What we really need is to get away from the "G"s and start concentrating on average real-world speed under load. What are people going to call "4G" technologies like LTE Advanced (the next generation of LTE)? It's going to offer vast improvements over the LTE that AT&T and Verizon are rolling out, but officially it's supposed to just be 4G. The number of "G"s doesn't matter. Ping times and bandwidth matter.