Ya the "3g" is a marketing term. We, the customers want it to mean or be based on speed but in its original form it was the third generation of wireless I think it is a ten year thing started in the 80's with the first cell phones and then in the 90's it received its revision and in 2000 the third gen rolled out, Now the 4th gen has officially come out.
Yeah, but the marketing term is effective.
When people say they want 3G, they mean they want 3G speed like the other carriers have.
Then some smart aleck comes along and says Metro has 3G because they have some archaic 3G protocol. That's like me having e Porsche stick shift in my Honda and claiming to the world that I have a Porsche!

It's very disingenuous and even insulting to the people who want more speed to claim they already have 3G and just don't know it.
Having 100k speed is NOT 3G that people are talking about, no matter how many "protocols" you have crammed in your network. You don't have acceptable 3G speed, then you don't have 3G.
That's why
Metro themselves do not claim to have 3G. They would be rightly laughed at, and
possibly sued, if they claimed to have 3G with only 100k speeds. They DID have it in 2 or 3 markets (Dallas, Detroit, LA) but when they LTE equipment went up, the 3G equipment came down.
They have said many, many, many times they are skipping 3G to go straight from 2G to LTE. I think they know their own network.
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Here's an article from 2009, two years ago, called
a day in the life of 3G:
A Day in the Life of 3G | PCWorld
Look at the chart. It compares the major carriers and their 3G speeds. This was TWO years ago. If you don't have this speed, you don't have 3G. Again, this was two years ago, so 3G speed is even faster now. We don't care about protocols, it's about
speed.