CEO Randall Stephenson defended AT&T’s aggressive following the filing of a by Sprint. During the ౠrecent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas𒈔, some of their competitors them, saying AT&T is “slapping 5G stickers” on upgraded 4G phones.

Stephenson says that 5G Evolution (5G E), represents new technology that they are deploying that deliv💙ers radical increases in speed and performance on their network.

, Chairman and CEO of , defends their 5G E marketing amid a lawsuit filing by in an interview with CNBC:

It’s an Evolutionary Step to 5G

It’ll play itself out obviously. We feel very comfortable with how we’ve characterized the new service that we’re launching. What we do is go into a market and we turn up a significant block of spectrum, wireless airways that we own. I mean it’s rather dramatic. We’re deploying new technology that I won’t go into the details of it, but when we go into a market and we turn up this technology and we light up this spectrum our customers are seeing radical increases in speed and performance on the network.

This is a step that’s required to get to ultimate . It’s an evolutionary step to 5G, a critical step. So we are characterizing this 5G E, 5G Evolution. We’ve obviously done our homework. We’ve done a lot of work around how we characterize this. We’re being very clear with our customers that this is an evolutionary step.

It’s Not a Play Everybody Can Run

But this is a dramatic step-change improvement in what the customers experience where we turn this up. I fully understand why our competitors might be upset with this. It’s not a play everybody can run. It’s a play that we really like. It’s a play that’s going to differentiate us in the marketplace as we begin to roll this out over the course of this year.