Engadget reported today on a ruling by the International Telecommunications Union on which wireless technologies can be called "4G". This sounds like a sober, technical ruling, but it's actually an arbitrary decision about a marketing term. "4G" means, simply, fourth generation. It is faster than the third generation. That is all that distinguishes it. So this progression, then,

2G, 3G and 4G

is no different from either of these:

Fast, super-fast and seriously super-fast

Tall, grande and venti

Let us read from the ITU's press release.

Geneva, 21 October 2010 - ITU's Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) has completed the assessment of six candidate submissions for the global 4G mobile wireless broadband technology, otherwise known as IMT-Advanced. Harmonization among these proposals has resulted in two technologies, "LTE-Advanced1" and "WirelessMAN-Advanced2" being accorded the official designation of IMT-Advanced, qualifying them as true 4G technologies.

Now, let us read again, inserting one arbitrary set of terms for another.

Geneva, 21 October 2010 - ITU's Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) has completed the assessment of six candidate submissions for the global seriously super-fast mobile wireless broadband technology, otherwise known as IMT-Advanced. Harmonization among these proposals has resulted in two technologies, "LTE-Advanced1" and "WirelessMAN-Advanced2" being accorded the official designation of IMT-Advanced, qualifying them as true seriously super-fast technologies.

Can we please, please, please, as consumers and policy-makers, all just agree to learn what a megabit per second is? The ITU set a number of engineering requirements that any seriously super-fast technology would have to meet, but the crucial one, and the only one that any of the new wireless standards cared about as they applied for seriously super-fast status, is speed. When consumers compare internet service providers, speed is the most important differentiator. The ITU's decision is about truth in advertising; it will allow two new technologies to market themselves as seriously super-fast.

Yet there is already a straightforward, precise measure that allows us to compare speed using figures and not words: the megabit per second. "Mega" is a prefix that means "one million". A bit is the basic unit of computing; it is either a one or a zero. A megabit is a million bits. If six megabits pass by a single point in a network in one second, that network is moving at six megabits per second, or 6 mbps.

Babbage is not ranting about needless, beautiful precision. Babbage is ranting about protecting consumers. Internet service providers love to hide what they offer behind words that suggest speed but evade responsibility for it. In America Comcast, a cable provider, is advertising a system upgrade called "Xfinity". It sounds fast, like something they'd test on a salt flat. But it's a technology with a boring acronym that offers about 30 megabits per second. It's nothing to be ashamed of, but Comcast is competing with a capital investment by Verizon, another telecoms operator, of optic-fibre to the home.

Optic-fibre to the home can offer speeds up to 100 megabits per second. This is awesomely, seriously super-fast. And yet, predictably, Verizon has called its new service "FiOS". Babbage can speculate as to why Verizon might have done this, but one consequence is that Verizon can better pick and choose among speed tiers and price plans, which are driven by competition and not by the underlying capabilities of the technology. "FiOS" is just fast. "Optic fibre to the home" has real meaning: the potential of 100 megabits per second. And, perversely, Verizon has sparred with cable operators over the use of the word "fibre", since it might mislead consumers. But the only thing that really matters to consumers is the cost of speed. How much are we paying for each additional megabit per second?

FiOS, Xfinity, 4G, seriously super-fast, a venti coffee: this is all obfuscation. It does not serve the consumer. It is as if the world had embraced the automobile, then declined to understand the meaning of a mile per hour or a mile per gallon. Without these measures, how could we compare cars or control highways?

I'm sorry, officer. I had no idea I was driving so seriously super-fast.

And then last week Julius Genachowski, the chairman of America's Federal Communications Commission, announced the commission's Consumer Empowerment Agenda.

Now, as we've all experienced, the new devices and services, in addition to bringing value, bring complexity, too. The more devices we buy, the more services we subscribe to, the more perplexing it can be for consumers. Instead of tracking minutes used, something intuitive -- consumers are being asked to track megabytes of data consumed. How many people even know what a megabyte is?

A byte is eight bits. A megabyte is a million bytes. There are about six megabytes in an mp3 of a pop song. But surely the chairman's right. Surely it's much more empowering to the consumer to be sold venti, 4G, seriously super-fast service than to just track the amount of data we're using and pay by the byte.