4G vs LTE Marketing Confusion

Let's face it the AT&T, Verizon, Sprint & T-Mobile, and the rest of the wireless carriers have enough money to convince most naive consumers to think whatever they want you to think.  Over that last decade, carriers have spent billions of dollars trying to differentiate their speeds and new phones.  But at the end of the day, the consumer does not care if their phone uses Wimax, 4G, HSPA+, or LTE.  They just want a reliable connection that is can access data speeds quickly.  Unfortunately, the carriers drink too much of their own Cool-Aid and marketing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of listening to your own BS. 

Here is a case in point based on the survey completed by IDC:  3G was a clever marketing term to convey faster speeds on phones and the industry spent billions of dollars promoting it. 85% of people understand it because they remember what 3G is. Remember the 3G Super Bowl commercials just a few years ago?  You would think that the industry would simply wrap their arms around the 4G marketing concept and run with that for a few years and save themselves some customer service headaches of explaining something new.

No, instead the industry has adopted a new technology called LTE which is mobile broadband.  LTE works as mobile broadband for your home network and also on some phones eventually.  Is it necessary for carriers to spend billions more educating consumers that they have LTE when they could have simply just called it 4G?  Someone in a marketing department at Verizon will eventually get fired over this if they don't figure it out soon.