AT&T is lying about 4G. Shamelessly. The company's two "4G" phones and its "4G" modem don't deliver 4G even by AT&T's own wishy-washy standards. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as the 4G police, and AT&T is going to get away with debasing the term and confusing consumers to everyone's disadvantage.

First of all, 4G is close to meaningless anyway. Initially the International Telecommunications Union defined 4G as a bunch of super-fast technologies nobody has yet, but the ITU crumbled under pressure from various cell phone companies and now defines 4G as, basically, any cellular Internet network that's faster than what was considered the fastest technology in 2009.

So we're seeing a wide variety in 4Gs here in the USA. Verizon has the closest to what most people would think of as real 4G. Verizon's LTE is a brand-new technology that's faster than most home Internet connections. But just to confuse you, MetroPCS has LTE too - but MetroPCS's 4G LTE can be slower than AT&T's 3G, because MetroPCS designed its network for low monthly plan costs rather than high speeds.

And you could argue that almost everyone has lied a little here. T-Mobile has two "4G" phones, the myTouch 4G and T-Mobile G2, which (while excellent) use a technology (HSPA 14.4) that T-Mobile later said isn't 4G. MetroPCS's Samsung Craft phone, while it uses LTE, gets lower apparent speeds than many other carriers' 3G smartphones because it has a slow processor and a relatively primitive Web browser.

AT&T has reached a new low, though, by delivering "4G" devices that are actually slower than the carrier's own 3G devices. Yes, you read it correctly: for AT&T, 4G is a step backwards. In the past few weeks we've compared two AT&T "4G" phones and an AT&T "4G" modem against a few 3G devices.

AT&T recently confirmed it is crippling the upload speeds on its two 4G phones, the Motorola Atrix and HTC Inspire. We also found slow upload speeds on the Shockwave 4G USB modem, although that may be a network rather than a device-based issue. Meanwhile, we got considerably faster speeds than the Atrix and Inspire on the Apple iPhone 4 and Dell Venue, both of which are supposedly "3G." We aren't seeing much faster download speeds on the 4G devices, either.

Why is AT&T doing this? I'm not sure. It could be that the network can't handle the strain. It could be that all of the devices have some horrible bug in the upload firmware. AT&T isn't saying.

Supposedly, the 4G phones will be upgraded to actually support 4G speeds in the future. That's great, but they shouldn't have been advertised as 4G until they did.

The carrier puts all sorts of stupid little fine print in its ads, trying to legally indemnify itself against the fact that its current 4G claim is totally worthless. But that doesn't balance out the fact that these phones are being advertised with 4G in the name, and if you stand in the same place with a "4G" phone and a "3G" phone on the same network, the 3G phone will be faster.

This is especially a pity because AT&T was doing a good job repairing the rips the iPhone caused in its 3G network. AT&T admitted it had a problem, faced up to it, and worked hard to fix it. Yes, the work came too late - AT&T should have prepared properly for the iPhone rather than fixing things after the fact - but for a while, there had been some clear honesty coming out of the carrier about what it needed to do to make things right.

AT&T's lies debase the concept of 4G in general, but maybe that's the point. AT&T has the fastest 3G network, as we showed in our 18-city tests last year. But Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile are all significantly ahead of AT&T on delivering 4G or 4G-ish devices. Since it's behind, AT&T's tactic seems to ruin the entire idea of 4G so as to cloud the picture. It'll be interesting to see whether the company has to backpedal, or repair customers' confused perceptions when it actually gets a network that's up to speed.

I'm pretty hopeless about there being a remedy for this. Sure, there are Internet petitions and potential class action lawsuits going around, but 4G at this point is such a meaningless term that I can't see them having much success. The HTC Inspire and Motorola Atrix are still two of the best phones on AT&T, and I still recommend them. But are they 4G? Not for now.

After Texas resident Keith Geissler noticed his new Motorola Atrix wasn’t offering the fast “4G” download and upload speeds that AT&T promised, he filed a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, asking the wireless company to “uncap” his data connection.

AT&T’s response was surprising. While the company assured Geissler it “has not capped the upload speeds on the Atrix,” it did admit that the phone’s HSUPA capability — a key feature in increasing upload speeds on the Atrix as well as the new HTC Inspire 4G smartphone — will not be enabled until a later date.

That means all upload speeds on the Atrix and the Inspire will max out at around 300 Kbps, far below that of the 5.5+ Mbps speeds that HSUPA is capable of uploading. (Geissler wasn’t happy to hear any of this, and posted the exchange to an online message board focused on smartphones.)

In other words, it’s not a hardware issue. It’s AT&T itself, which isn’t ready to flip the switch to turn on “4G” networks, even though it’s already selling 4G phones. Is anyone surprised?

“The concept of 4G is a joke now,” Gartner Research VP Phil Redman told Wired.com. “At the highest level, it’s supposed to be a technology standard, but it’s nothing but marketing now. If and when 4G-standardized technology is actually decided upon and released, we’ve been inundated with this jargon for so long we may not even recognize it.”

The term “4G speed” seems open to interpretation. Since the International Telecommunications Union — the global authority on telecommunications- and broadband-industry standardization – revised its ruling on what defines 4G network speeds in December 2010, carriers have jumped on the opportunity to market many new smartphones as 4G-enabled. Their definitions have been liberal, to say the least.

For AT&T, part of “4G” compatibility involves having HSUPA speeds. AT&T has been mostly evasive as to why HSUPA has been disabled in the Atrix and HTC Inspire 4G smartphones. The company claims it is performing “the testing and preparations necessary” for users to enjoy the HSUPA capabilities when the function is turned on by phone update.

To add insult to injury to Android users expecting 4G speeds, many iOS counterpart devices using AT&T’s 3G network are indeed HSUPA-enabled.

“Not to twist the dagger that’s already in our backs on this one,” said one forum user at XDA Developers, “as many know, the iPad 2 came out today and guess what … HSUPA enabled.”

Also HSUPA ready: the iPhone 4, a device using AT&T’s 3G network.

So when can we actually expect 4G upload speeds from these “4G” phones? AT&T gave Wired.com a rough street date of next month.

“We will be turning HSUPA upload speeds on via a software update to the Motorola ATRIX 4G and HTC Inspire 4G planned for April,” a spokesman said. He also added that “the Samsung Infuse 4G will launch with HSUPA.”

AT&T isn’t the first to fudge facts on its data practices. In the weeks before the iPhone’s release on the Verizon network in February, the carrier published a document that said the top 5 percent of data users on the network may have their data speeds reduced “to ensure high-quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand.”

As Wired.com’s Brian X. Chen reported, “One of Verizon’s selling points for its version of the iPhone is that it would come with an unlimited data plan — a marked contrast to AT&T, which eliminated its unlimited data plans last year.” But when a company’s shifty data-throttling practices are “disclosed” in unpublicized PDF files, Chen’s assertion that “you just can’t trust wireless carriers” proves accurate.

AT&T obviously hasn’t claimed the lack of HSUPA-enabling in the two phones to be a data-throttling technique. But until we hear reasons beyond “network testing and preparation,” we won’t be so quick to believe them.

CNET has confirmed with AT&T that it will enable the HSUPA radios on the Motorola Atrix 4G and HTC Inspire 4G via a software update in April.
HSUPA, which stands for High-Speed Uplink Packet Access, is the protocol that enables faster upload speeds (up to 5.76Mbps) on your mobile phone. However, it recently came to light that the technology was disabled on the Atrix 4G and Inspire 4G, crippling the smartphones with slow-as-molasses upload speeds.
The fact that these radios were not turned on was not disclosed to customers who bought the Atrix and Inspire, prompting calls to the Better Business Bureau, online petitions, and multiple forum threads.

AT&T couldn't provide us with a more specific time frame, but nevertheless, it's good to know that a fix is on the way. In addition, the upcoming Samsung Infuse 4Gs will ship with the HSUPA radio already turned on, so you should see faster upload speeds right out of the box, though the carrier cautions that other factors like location, time, and network capacity can affect data speeds.