Engadget:
After AT&T decided to start rolling out “5G Evolution” branding on phones and networks that use 4G LTE Advanced technology, competitors have had to make decisions on how to respond. While T-Mobile mocked it with a sticker, Verizon (Engadget’s parent company) fired off a letter. So what is Sprint going to do? It has filed a lawsuit in federal court, seeking an injunction to prevent AT&T from using 5GE tags on its devices or advertising.
5GE is enhanced LTE, not 5G. That 5GE branding is consumer-hostile, at the very least.
From the AT&T Mobility Wikipedia page:
In 2017, AT&T began to similarly use the trademark 5G Evolution (5G E) to refer to LTE networks upgraded to support higher data speeds via LTE-Advanced and LTE Advanced Pro features, such as 4×4 MIMO antennas, 256-QAM, and three-way carrier aggregation. AT&T promotes these services as having a theoretical top speed of 400 Mbit/s. The suite is supported on certain high-end Android smartphones offered by the carrier, such as the LG V30 and the Samsung Galaxy S8 and S9, and the iPhone XR and XS. In late 2018, AT&T began to deploy software updates to display a “5G E” network indicator when connected to such a network.
This is a bad look, AT&T. Pull that 5GE from the status bar before your brand takes an even bigger hit.
If only carriers were still effectively regulated as public utilities.
They won’t change it unless forced. They did the exact same thing years back by changing the 3G icon to read 4G before they deployed LTE. iPhones still do it when in an area where LTE is no longer available, even though they are almost certainly falling back to 3G connections.