5G branding goes to get much more complicated, quickly: T-Mobile has announced that it’ll be rolling out a brand new “5G UC” icon on the upcoming iPhone 13 lineup to let clients know once they’re linked to T-Mobile’s “5G Ultra Capacity” community, as an alternative of the common outdated 5G community.

The distinction right here is one among bands and types: at T-Mobile, an unadorned “5G” icon will quickly seek advice from the corporate’s low-band community, which it calls “5G Extended Range.” As the title suggests, it’s a slower community (nearer to legacy LTE speeds) however it reaches a broader space. From a spectrum perspective, it exists in largely the identical areas as LTE however makes use of 5G applied sciences and strategies for improved speeds.

A “5G UC” icon, although, will imply that you simply’re both linked to T-Mobile’s mid-band community (which it inherited from Sprint as a part of the most important merger between the 2 corporations) or its high-band mmWave community (branded as “5G Ultra Capacity”) — each of which provide dramatically sooner speeds. As PC Mag’s annual 5G speed test confirmed this yr, that mid-band protection particularly (hitting the candy spot of pace improve and vary) has been a giant contributor towards T-Mobile’s vastly improved community choices.

And whereas one more 5G model commonplace is complicated, it’s not with out precedent. Verizon has been differentiating between its low-band 5G (additionally referred to as “5G”) and its mmWave protection (“5G UW,” or ultra-wideband) because it began rolling out these networks years in the past. AT&T does one thing comparable, too, referring to low-band 5G as “5G,” whereas its mmWave networks are “5G Plus.”

AT&T additionally has the unlucky tendency to misleadingly seek advice from its LTE networks as “5G E,” which, in contrast to the opposite flavors of 5G on this record, will not be really 5G in any respect.

But T-Mobile’s change is arguably a vital one: the push to promote clients on 5G and slap the next-generation networking’s branding all over the place has meant that the low-band networks most individuals at present expertise as “5G” is definitely pretty comparable — virtually talking — to LTE. But now that carriers are literally rolling out the larger enhancements that do deliver significant pace and latency will increase, they’re caught in an issue of their very own devising: common “5G” is simply too diluted of a model to make an impression, therefore the extra bombastic ultras and pluses being appended to icons and logos.

The new 5G UC icons ought to begin rolling out quickly on the iPhone 13 fashions as soon as they’re launched, in addition to last year’s iPhone 12 lineup.