Last week there were several press releases announcing that AT&T was working with a major corporation to provide a test of 5G technology. A few days later the industry found out that the company taking part in the test is Intel, which will be making the chips involved in the tests. Intel will apparently be beta testing early units for providing high-speed bandwidth at one of their locations.

It really bothers me every time I see one of these announcements, because the whole industry seems to have bought into the hype from companies like AT&T that conflate two totally different technologies under the name of 5G. The AT&T and Intel test is going to be for a technology to provide faster indoor wireless connections using millimeter wave spectrum in competition with WiFi.

But most of the world sees the term ‘5G’ and assumes it means the next generation of cellular…