[rbranson]

It's just a marketing term for marketing to people who don't care about link protocols or multiplexing strategies. The problem was originally started when 1xRTT and EDGE were branded as 3G. This should have never happened, but that's what happens when marketing drives your business instead of engineering.

Honestly, even EVDO isn't really a true 3G protocol, as voice and data are completely separate protocols. UMTS phones don't drop to a voice-only technology to make a call, they use the data signaling, and IP connectivity isn't lost during phone calls. However, the fact that CDMA folks decided to go with a less ambitious, but easier to deploy megabit+ broadband technology meant they were able to beat the GSM networks to the punch. Worse is better.

That being said, WiMAX and LTE are legitimate 4G technologies. They both step up to using OFDMA instead of CDMA, which gives them a much higher theoretical bandwidth ceiling. Yes, HSPA+ networks have been pushing into WiMAX's bandwidth territory by adding MIMO and 64QAM modulation, but that's pretty much the ceiling for HSPA. The only future it has is in multi-carrier or multi-tower arrangements, which don't increase the spectral efficiency and are pointless in dense urban areas.

[rue]

Technically WiMAX and LTE are not 4G technologies. LTE-Advanced is to be.