Operators have been talking about 4G for so long that it might come as a surprise to learn the ITU, the telecoms standardisation body, has only recently approved two candidate technologies for possible classification as 4G standards. What’s more, neither exists in commercial form today.

So what’s with all the 4G hype? As our recent article points out (see Name calling), operators have been a little too eager to pounce on the 4G label, using it to describe a couple of competing technologies from which the ITU’s candidate 4G standards will eventually be developed. The reason seems to be a need to differentiate advances in mobile broadband technology from the original crop of 3G networks, whose performance now looks very disappointing. After resorting to 3.5G and even 3.9G, they finally laid claim to 4G – much to the ITU’s annoyance.

Does any of this really matter? We think it does for a couple of reasons. First, consumers have already grown distrustful of operators’ promises on speed, and the misuse of labels has made a bad situation worse. Having bred scepticism by describing their relatively slow mobile-broadband technologies as 4G, operators will find it much harder to sell the real 4G – which is supposed to be much, much faster than anything available today – when it comes along.

Second, it shows a lack of imagination on the part of the operators themselves. Resorting to technical jargon is bad enough (mobile broadband would be better, but it has become associated specifically with the use of dongles and laptops). Worse, many operators have talked up their ability to compete on services with the likes of Google and Apple. The marketing focus on network performance suggests they don’t really believe it.