AT&T’s current 5G is slower than 4G in nearly every city tested by PCMag
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
There are scenarios where you might see massive speeds, though. 5G heavily leverages Carrier Aggregation, where a client can connect to multiple channels at once, increasing bandwidth, and beam-forming, where the "shape" of the signal is modified to steer maximum power to the physical location of a client. If you happen to be near a base station with good Signal to Noise Ratio while downloading something large, the base station can allocate multiple channels and use beamforming to finish your download at Gbps speeds and get you off the network faster, freeing up spectrum time for more users at lower SNR's and bandwidths.
There is potential for much more impactful deployment of 5G cellular in rural areas where there aren't many buildings or walls blocking high frequency signal. The same goes for point-to-point links such as inter-building WAN or low latency self driving car to self driving car communication.
Come to think of it, pre-merger Sprint probably had the best launch strategy which was to launch 5G on mid-band where they had enough spectrum to service both LTE and 5G NR users. Masayoshi Son was too busy flushing his money down other toilets like WeWork and Uber to cut the checks Sprint needed to get it completed nationwide. Sprint also suffered from having 5 or 6 different equipment vendors across the country... where T-Mobile had two. They have been ripping out the NSN 5G equipment from NYC post-merger, because this is a T-Mobile Ericsson market and they don't want to deal with it.
AT&T meanwhile got a $100 billion 25yr contract from the post-9/11 telecom pork project, FirstNet[2]. So they've been throwing up tons of new sites with that money over the past year or two. I don't think anyone was thinking about 5G or spectrum planning over there, just focusing on acquiring consumers through acquisitions (Directtv, some crappy Mexican carriers) and getting government contracts. Gov M2M stuff moves slower than Apple at acquiring new modem technologies for their devices, so there's not a huge rush to ramp up 5G.
https://www.t-mobile.com/support/coverage/t-mobile-network#t... < [1] tmo band listing
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-revs-up-5g-... < [2] News coverage of tmo bandwidth deployment over a year ago.
https://washingtontechnology.com/blogs/editors-notebook/2017... [3] Firstnet contract
In markets where there are functioning markets, the benefits go to consumers. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/europe-not...
The Great Reversal https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674237544
Ya, "Faster speeds mean people will spend less time clogging the connection" ... it never happens that way. Increased speeds mean people use more internet, not less. Consumers start doing new things with the faster speeds (streaming video etc) increasing demand and overall usage. The only real answer is massive and constantly increasing speeds and bandwidth capacities. It is a race that cannot be won but must be run nevertheless.
Limits go down when providers have limited competition.
That depends on the country/network/plan. I have unlimited 5G data and get consistent speeds in the 200-300 Mbps range, sometimes higher. Some months I will use 1 TB of data or more. Streaming games on Stadia uses a lot of bandwidth!
Unless the carriers have a sudden outbreak of generosity, data caps won't rise under 5G, so usage per person will stay the same but improved efficiency will allow the carriers to extract more profits from more people per cell simultaneously.
5G doesn't solve any problems for end-users. It solves the carriers' problem of 'how can we get more people to use up their data cap faster.'
Of course, how fast and aggressively the prices come down depends on the competitive environment in your country. But it will happen.
:(
I miss my old O2 and Orange £10 top-ups I’d buy as a sport with my weekly pocket-money.
Verizon's $80/month plan (for individuals) right now has unlimited 5G, plus 50GB of 4G LTE before you hit the soft cap. When 4G LTE was first introduced, the price was $80 for 10GB of 4G LTE. That's a factor of 5 improvement in less than a decade. Likewise, I can get 150 mbps+ on XLTE out here in the 'burbs (where Verizon's network really shines). Back in 2011, 5-10 mbps would have been great speeds.
What else in the computer industry has improved by that much over the last decade? Maybe multi-core performance of Apple's phone CPUs? (7x jump from 2013 to today.) Certainly nothing in the desktop or laptop realm. A 2019 iMac with 9th generation core CPU is only about twice as fast (multicore) than a 2011 iMac with 3rd generation core CPU.
EDIT: The $45/month is lines on a family plan. Corrected to compare $80/month for an individual plan.
SSDs were still SATA in 2010 and capped at 500GB/s (and in practice were slower than that). High-end SSDs today are maxing out PCIe 4.0 x4 for 6000+ GB/s.
GPUs probably have a 10x increase in speed. AMD 5870 and GTX 200 series... yeah... that's way old.
Hard drive capacity is probably 10x bigger, maybe.
CPUs and RAM haven't improved much. Most things seem to be getting faster though.
The same sense as in 'everyone should have a pony, alas we live in the real world'? Or the sense of 'no one shall offer anyone an internet connection unless they can satisfy these arbitrary requirements I just made up'?
I can sign up for the former. The latter would just lead to fewer people getting into the business.
Note that I never said payment models need to stick to a fixed monthly price. Metered connections (at a small multiple above cost) are an option.
What if the power company cut you off or greatly reduced your electricity after your consumption hit top N% of users? Why should the internet be much different?
If the contract I entered with the power company allows them to do that (and I presumably got a cheaper deal on my electricity in return), that's all fair.
For instance, there is a maximum display resolution after which point it does not make any sense to continue adding pixels, color depth or redraws per second. Most would successfully argue that we have hit that point years ago. For such displays, there is a constant maximum amount of video information that could be presented per unit time. This is somewhere in the realm of 10~1000mbps.
Audio is another good example where we've decided that ~1.5 mbps for uncompressed stereo audio is about as much as you'd ever really need.
Beyond this, there isn't a whole lot else that consumes substantial bandwidth per device. Assuming all gaming would be streaming over such incredible networks and A/V technologies, there is no need to worry about archaic things such as application binary, texture or other asset sizes.
If you browse to an imgur hosted image on a mobile device, you'll find that the quality is visibly bad. And it's not because the client didn't have enough bandwidth.
You'll get more users if the network is less congested, but that's a good thing.
Do keep in mind that mobile devices have bottlenecks other than Internet speed. Eg limited battery. Or just plain old limited monthly data volume.
> The only real answer is massive and constantly increasing speeds and bandwidth capacities. It is a race that cannot be won but must be run nevertheless.
The victory is in giving people more Internet. They like that.
But: even the highest bitrates you get on eg YouTube ain't good enough to show certain scenes nicely. Especially when snow is involved. That's because the video compression algorithms we have don't cope well with that.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Rp-uo6HmI
So there's a clear and simple use case for more bandwidth, even if we don't increase resolution.
Do you have reports that show this? I've read a recent isp report that show as people moved to gigabit fiber, their usage didn't go up as had been feared. The report showed that beyond a certain number, something like 100mb/s, usage no longer went up as bandwidth increased. Additionally, infrastructure costs went significantly down for the ISP showing that moving to fiber everywhere makes good financial sense for them.
This isn't surprising at all. We see this in computing as well. When designing clusters, other network specs such a latency and jitter become the bottleneck above certain speeds, depending on the application.
When using MM wave, inexpensive repeaters can be used to extend the reach of base stations around corners and into buildings efficiently. On the flip side, the reduction of cell size facilitated by lower interference allows greater reuse of spectrum.
Marketing but worthwhile background reading material:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/11/will-5g-w...
Whaaaaaat? Is this some aesthetic preference, or a "humans weren't meant to share this knowledge of the divine", or are you trying to sell more weather resistant clothing? And if you wish to practice weather agnosticism, why is your preference so strong that you view the overall human lack of weather-knowledge positively? What do you think of meteorologists? I have so many questions...
Wireless is exempt from the restrictions that wired services are forced to accept. Wireless carriers can terminate apps that they consider disruptive and have fewer neutrality and limit restrictions.
You’re not going to have meaningful competition, and the national security nonsense attributed to 5G allows for things like siting infrastructure dramatically cheaper than incumbents.
The regulation is much easier for carriers to control at the federal level, especially with the courts in the state they are in.
The comment you replying to talked about market competition bringing prices down. Not about regulation bringing prices down.
For example, 5G antennas have been declared critical defense infrastructure, cable TV has not. That means that your cable company needs to follow local ordinances, get permits, rent existing pole space, etc. The 5G people can drop an antenna wherever they want with 30 days notice — on my block, a 5G millimeter wave pole was dropped three feet away from an existing telephone pole, in the middle of a sidewalk.
Wireless also operates under rules that allow it to do more revenue generation for things like prioritization, etc.
Just look at the amount of memes bemoaning that you've been at home for 3h but forgot to turn wifi on.
That depends on where you're located. In the UK, unlimited data plans are common on 4G/5G, and mobile carriers compete directly for home broadband customers. For example:
http://www.three.co.uk/store/broadband/home-broadband
https://www.vodafone.co.uk/gigacube/
In my case, since there's no fibre installed into my building, 5G wireless with unlimited data (no caps, no throttling) works out both slightly cheaper and much faster than any available wired option.
Congress doesn’t allow states to regulate wireless services in the manner that other utilities are regulated. Regulatory teeth really only exists at the state level.
There's no (binding) regulation on the price of bread and yet, people can usually afford the stuff.
In most of the world, most of the time retail prices for bread are allowed to vary, and a bakery can offer a loaf of bread for 50 dollars or for 10 cents without issue.
You are right that there's lots of regulations and subsidies and taxes in the whole production chain of bread.
So if you want a more sophisticated version of my toy argument, then let's argue based on sliding scales, not binary distinctions:
There's lots of different products in different industries in different countries, and larger amounts of regulation don't seem to correlate with lower prices or better quality. If anything, it's just the opposite.
See especially black markets that are by definition at most lightly regulated and spring up every time the regulations on the formal markets go awry. (I don't want to so 'every time regulations become too much' because it's not about quantity so much as it is about sensible rules.)
Competition breaking and being unfair goes back to at least ancient Roman law, here's a Wikipedia article on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_competition_law
If the 2,000 years of examples there isn't enough I can provide lots more.
The competition zealots only have "thought experiments" and pretend like there is no history to this stuff.
Lots of the laws mentioned in the Wikipedia article you linked to are pretty anticompetitive. Eg
> Under Diocletian, in 301 AD an Edict on maximum prices established a death penalty for anyone violating a tariff system, for example by buying up, concealing or contriving the scarcity of everyday goods.
Or just next:
> It provided for property confiscation and banishment for any trade combinations or joint action of monopolies private or granted by the Emperor. Zeno rescinded all previously granted exclusive rights.[4] Justinian I also introduced legislation not long after to pay officials to manage state monopolies.
It's all about government enforced monopolies.
On the more positive side: have a look at eg Herbert Dow and the breaking of the German Bromine Cartel. (Eg via https://fee.org/articles/herbert-dow-and-predatory-pricing/ or look at any other article you can find on that.)
Or George Selgin's Good Money (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3392302-good-money) about an episode in the English Industrial Revolution when the private sector minted coins because the government monopoly was inept.
What does full substitution mean here?
Because I do not see them as strongly competing technologies. Cable has sheer speed and latency on its side and 5G has mobility. Switching my cable connection today for a 5G connection tomorrow would make my life worse. They both fill niches the other can't.
Of course, the better they substitute, the more competition there is. But in the grand scheme of things, even eg email and telephone and driving and sending a letter compete with each other to a certain extent.
So eg for watching a movie, latency ain't that important.
I live in Singapore, and my options right now are 4G and fibre.
In practice, 4G is regularly faster and lower latency for me around the flat, but that's just because I usually cripple my fibre connection by using it via wifi. And our 4G is usually more than competitive with wifi.
The wifi router is just the cheap one that the ISP gave us. When I went next to it just now, it reached 330Mbps (also on fast.com via the iPhone's wifi).
Why main complaint is the latency of the wifi when we are in a different part of the flat, ie through a wall. I suspect there might be some packet loss and then tcp adds a few round-trips to resend packages and the congestion control reduces the amount of data sent or something like that.
But I'd also say it's pretty crowded, there's lots of other wifi networks around since we are in the heart of Singapore.
I have heard of these claims of 1Gbps+ massive MIMO LTE in Singapore, but is it really achievable in the real world or just a "theoretical" speed? There are impressive speed claims for 5G here in the UK, but 500 Mbps or so seems to be the real-world peak for most current devices.
Only a few handsets can achieve the Gigabit LTE. I don't think any iPhone is amongst them. (It is after all predominately an American device. And what good would that capability do you in the US?)
The Gigabit LTE is useful in practice not so much for any sustained Gigabit speeds, but because it allows your phones to 'race to idle'. Most traffic is bursty, and higher peak speeds mean your phone transmits for a smaller proportion of time. Leaving more time for other phones on the network, and perhaps helping with battery conservation?
3.6Ghz 5G has been a big benefit for me in London, where I consistently get 200-300 Mbps and low pings. 4G tops out in the 50-70 Mbps range.
Whether this will still be the case once there's a ton of new 5G iPhones added to the network, I'm not sure!
But in general, it's just nice to have faster downloads. Nice not to have to wait as long for those multi-GB OS updates, game updates, app updates, etc. Don't you agree?
I have no desire for my phone to be faster in either processing power or bandwidth -- it would give me absolutely no benefit.
I wish 5G, 8K video (and even 4k in many cases), etc., were not thrust upon consumers. Things are already good enough to be close to magic.
Bill Gates infamously said sometime in the 80's "640K is more memory than anyone will ever need" , and for the scope of computer applications at the time he was correct.
Why would we expect value to scale linearly with memory and transistor count? I would in fact expect it to be logarithmic: each doubling would lead to a roughly linear increase in cool stuff we can do.
I think that's what we see. Yes, our computers could be radically better experiences if it weren't for the bad habit of squandering improvements with layers of unnecessary abstraction and laziness. But the only thing standing in our way is those unnecessary and that laziness, so maybe we should stop doing that, now that real gains in speed are slowing down.
The counter argument is that this is over-, premature, or unnecessary optimization. If we can put 2GB of memory in a computer for $20, why spend millions on R&D that will be rewritten to make it work on 128 MB?
There is also an environmental argument for your point, but everything will always be a tradeoff to companies trying to build and sell devices quickly.
I'm pretty sure that it's right on the diminishing returns margin, however. I don't have an 8K resolution device to try it out on, but that's because everything I use is in the 'retina' zone of pixel density, I never see a genuine pixel under normal circumstances. (Actually my TV isn't 4K but if I cared at all it would be).
For what I use my phone for, the only thing which could improve in a way I would notice is the camera. That won't be true for everyone, games in particular have an essentially unlimited appetite for specs, but this is just to say that the state of the art as of four years ago is still just fine by me.
Downsampling a high-resolution video is always possible, the reverse is an... unsolved problem.
But the technology to add missing detail will never exist; we must be content with a realistic facsimile.
You are right in a sense. But there are some details that are in the pixels but that your eyes can't see. You can upscale to make them visible to the eyes.
If I flip to landscape though it can be noticeably, significantly worse.
For monitors, the maximum resolution is a bit behind 4K (since monitors are closer than TVs), and I suspect that’s why Apple offers a 5K iMac.
I didn’t estimate this for mobile devices.
Sure, AT&T 5G isn’t great now, but it’s all about spectrum allocation.
That spectrum allocation will only become more and more 5G-leaning over time. 5G isn’t the same great leap as 4G was, but I’d still take it over 4G.
4G might be good enough for you right now, but your needs will increase, way more and way faster than you expect. Remember this the next time you try to do a video call / watch an HD video / etc. If we had stayed in 3G, you would not be able to do any of these, but when 4G was introduced you did not feel any need for them.
Forever? Is there no bandwidth so great that most users would be happy with it? Can new uses for extra bandwidth always be found, and do at least some of those uses always significantly improve the user experience?
> Remember this the next time you try to do a video call / watch an HD video / etc. If we had stayed in 3G, you would not be able to do any of these
I wouldn't? News to me! I just disabled 4G on my phone, which fell back to HSPA+ with a fast.com result of about 7mbps. I then successfully tested a Zoom test meeting with video (worked fine) and watched a YouTube video at 1080p (buffered for three seconds at the start, noticeably longer than usual, but then played fine).
So what's going on there?
The fact is that every year mobile data consumption is increasing significantly and it is expected to continue this trend. I do not have an opinion on whether more data equals better user experience.
> I just disabled 4G on my phone, which fell back to HSPA+ with a fast.com result of about 7mbps. I then successfully tested a Zoom test meeting with video (worked fine) and watched a YouTube video at 1080p (buffered for three seconds at the start, noticeably longer than usual, but then played fine).
Without knowing the context of your set up, I can only guess. I would say that not that many people use 3G in your area, so you used an uncongested cell.
I mean, since the invention of semi trucks, you could technically can send me ~40 tons of postcards to me all in one shipment, which would be impossible in the days where postcards were sent via a guy with a satchel on horseback, but then why aren't you sending me 40 tons of postcards right now? Why would you even want to?
Don't get me wrong, semi trucks certainly have it's uses and has enabled many things, so would 5G provided it does something better than 4G, but I can see why some people would go "Why would you want more of that?" Not everyone has the same wants and needs.
These days, latency seems more problematic to me than bandwidth. Unfortunately though, short of optimizing networks, and reducing the distance between server and client, there's not much that can be done for latency...
And that's why 4G is useful for a lot of people even if it's not useful for you specifically.
5G will be similar. _You_ might not benefit, but a lot of other people will.
While 20mbps vs 100mbps is nice to have the luxury of comparing on mobile, my bigger question is how many gb you can consume as a user before getting throttled.
Canada has speedy mobile networks... and $5-$10/gb pricing. No wonder why it’s fast.
Your $100/month Canadian plan doesn’t.
As I understand it, the "true" original definition of 5G was millimeter wave technology. From the PCMag article this is based on:
> Millimeter-wave uses very weak, short-range panels that are easily blocked by obstacles. In our tests, millimeter-wave doesn't generally penetrate buildings, and even has trouble with glass; we had our drivers keep their windows down, with the phones facing out, so the network even had a chance.
That is, this kind of 5G is essentially useless now, and will be for a long time until buildings/cars/subways etc. are built with repeaters that would make indoor coverage possible.
However, I definitely don't understand all the various versions of "5G" so it's difficult for me to understand which tech is used by which phones and carriers.
Sub-6 is about beam-forming — instead of sending your signal in all directions, it sends only in the direction of your device (and visa-versa which is why antenna design is a larger cost on mobile than before). Now the base station can use the same bandwidth for another device located in a different direction. Over time this will get better and have compounding effects.
And that’s just one item in the basket. mmWave is another. There are several.
Another bucket is coding schemes: LTE uses Turbo and Convolutional Coding, whereas 5G adds Polar and LDPC codes to the mix which bring us closer to the Shannon Limit (theoretical maximum data capacity given a certain SNR).
5G marketing is concentrating on new high-band, because first 5G installations are deployed into new high-band.
5G spectrum covers also low-band and-mid band spectrum from 1G through 4G LTE frequencies.
5G installations in the countryside will have low-band that is more efficient than 4G/LTE. You can have _less_ base stations than LTE, not more in the low-band. 5G NR is more efficient radio interface in all bandwidths.
It also is available on new frequencies. Lots of bandwidth on those frequencies, but a lot less signal propagation too. Helpful for sports stadiums, transit terminals, and other crowded situations, not so helpful for most situations.
Carrier aggregation sounds like it could be useful too.
I’m looking at 5G developments with bewildered amusement :popcorn: (especially the beyond ridiculous marketing side) and honestly couldn’t care less right now.
^ mentioning iPhone 7 because I had a 8 that stupidly went MIA, and the 7’s connection definitely is “lousier” that the 8 was, which was able to maintain a solid connection (obviously not at the speeds above, but continuously usable) on a 350kph TGV.
"All three US carriers showed significantly higher download speeds and better broadband reliability than they did in our 2019 tests."
Then they took down the tower nearest to my flat for "improvements" a couple months into the pandemic and from then on it basically didn't work at all (it was supposed to switch to 4G and it theoretically did but the best I got with that was an extremely flaky 10mbps). They originally said it'd be fixed in a week but it was completely unusable for at least a month. So now I'm back to a cable connection.
I still miss the 5G though -- there was something pretty amazing about just plugging it into the mains and suddenly having super-fast wifi with 0 installation. I personally remain optimistic about its future, unlike pretty much everyone else in this thread I guess.
That said, I wouldn't go near a 5G phone right now; in a year or so the price and battery impact will be down a lot.
The primary use case I can think of is to replace traditional cable broadband with it, but that would be impractically expensive given the cost of mobile data.
I think wireless data speeds is the new arms race tbh. The interesting thing is Verizon is not upselling you for 5G and AT&T is. Plus AT&T was sued saying they had 5G in areas they really didn't and now this article claiming their speeds in certain cities are faster than they actually are.
The real question is, how many people will switch because of this issue and over selling it on their part?
That needn't be the case with 5G -- there's a lot more bandwidth to go around, particularly with mmwave, so home broadband (with unlimited or near-unlimited service) are more feasible. Verizon is piloting a home 5G service in several cities for this reason, and it doesn't have a data cap.
When stand alone 5G becomes available, the latency of the network will become comparable to the latency of wired networks, especially if it is combined with mobile edge computing. Then, you will have access to new services that are impossible now, such as game steaming and VR.
I agree though that 5G is way more important for the public sector and the industry than the average consumer.
Streaming VR would be a valid use though, the resolutions there are much higher.
The problem is that data caps will severely limit this. I can play an hour of streaming 1080p gaming before eating through almost 20% of my data cap. I usually tone it down to 720p. Data caps haven't actually improved that much over the years either: Now I pay $20/month with Mint for 8Gb. The supposedly "unlimited" plans from Verizon start at $70 and have an effective cap of 15Gb. Compare this to around 5 years ago where things were around 5Gb, if memory serves (and mint didn't exist).
The backbone network capacity that mobile networks tap into isn't going to get any cheaper for providers, even if 5G signals bouncing around their own network have higher bandwidth, so I don't know how much 5G will actually reduce mobile providers' costs per unit of bandwidth if it significantly alters the peering ratio of backbone traffic interchange.
Given this, I skeptical that new high-bandwidth applications will be able to get much traction, at least not before 3-5 years of additional product maturity & capital costs to providers for the upgraded hardware have been covered and they can gradually lower costs toward the marginal cost of production.
With the introduction of slicing, it will be possible to have specific SIM cards as “first class citizens”, with complete priority over everything in the network, while also being secure. These SIMs can become “first class citizens” dynamically. So for example devices that belong to firefighters can become so, during an emergency. This enables ordinary devices to meet the high SLAs needed in such cases. Thus, now firefighters can use the already existing, way more powerful (for example it can do live video) and cheap public network, instead of their current communications solutions.
Your example with the firefighters is a good one, no matter whether they are public sector employees like in the US or privatised like in Denmark. That's why I was confused.
And it's important to note that right now, 5G isn't that much more efficient than LTE. Remember, when LTE came out, it was advertised as 5-8Mbps which we'd consider slow today. 5G NR will get better as it evolves. However, right now it looks like it'll be around 20% more efficient in low-band deployments and 50% more efficient in mid-band deployments (T-Mobile had numbers similar to that in some FCC filings during their merger proceedings, IIRC). Things like higher-order MIMO will help mid-band and higher applications more.
Given the chart of relative 5G/4G download speeds and the fact that T-Mobile usually beats their 4G network, it seems likely that AT&T is leaning heavily on LAA for their LTE performance and that's the difference-maker. As Release-16 becomes what networks and phones are using, that will likely change.
https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/fastest-networks/03efBScpy2I3SSV...
And you need base stations on every street.
So you need fiber to every street anyway.
Google/Verizon's "fiber roll-out" was FttP, and what GP was talking about, and it's very understandable to abandon that approach to just FttN plus 5G.
I think you're right that some halt of the fiber rollout is likely due to the impact that 5G will have. Even if mmWave spectrum can't go very far, it probably offers a good last-few-hundred-feet option. Instead of having to run fiber into someone's home, they can run fiber to their street and let a wireless link handle the last bit. They don't have to deal with construction permits, digging, coordinating with homeowners, etc.
However, I don't know what the costs of 5G equipment are right now and there might be resistance from neighborhoods that don't want a 5G cell-site on top of a bunch of lamp-posts in their area. I don't find them that intrusive, but many people have strong aesthetic opinions on their neighborhoods. It'll be interesting to see how things turn out.
IME, most of the resistance is from people who think that 5G is going to give them cancer. Pseudo-scientific anti-5G posts abound on local facebook groups.
High-bandwidth wireless data, even using the latest 5G technology, still literally requires ample bandwidth: wide enough radio frequency channel(s) over which to communicate. So far, two major US cellular providers (AT&T and T-Mobile) have allocated so little spectrum space to 5G, that 4G connections are still faster in almost every city tested. For example, on AT&T’s 4G network, phones can use up to seven radio bands simultaneously to increase speeds, but phones on 5G are still limited to a single 5MHz band.
Sounds like this is what empirical testing of AT&T and T-Mobile networks would have expected to find. Verizon’s 5G network isn’t showing this issue because they’re using only millimeter-wave spectrum and equipment, with the trade-off being scant availability because of its tiny usable cell area.
How will going from say 40mbps to 250mbps+ on a phone help me in any way over the next 2 years? For video, the limits of a phone display cap the max bitrate below 5G's speed. 1080p at 60fps is around 16mbps.
All I expect is that I'll burn through my monthly data sooner, and not see a dime of faster, cheaper technology improvement.
Why should I be in favor of 5G?
More seriously, as more 5G is deployed it should speed up. Also I believe 5G allows more phones to use a single tower at once which should make the carriers job easier. Especially at very busy places like festivals and sporting events.
So, then, it comes naturally to ask what is the exact problem that 4G has but 5G aims to solve, besides all the marketing and change for its own sake. Especially that weird kind of 5G that can't go through your hand and has coverage area of a single tower smaller than that of a WiFi access point.
We’ll probably get a mix of the two deployed depending on topography, density, cost, etc.
release 8 is slow. your phone would show 4G
release 14 is super fast. your phone would show 4G
release 15 will show 5G but it's just one iteration away from fast 4G.
it brings some cool techniques that boost efficiency (more people in the same cell can download things, increasing the average speed) -- and other stuff. peak download rate is one of the less interesting features, but most prominent.
Remember, you must have a 5G capable phone!
I think the cellular carriers should invest more in improving their coverage, especially in rural areas. Of course, that'll never happen because the carriers would rather focus their investments in the big cities, where people are willing to buy a $1000 smartphone every year.
The appeal of smartphones is the ability to watch videos, play games, etc anywhere you are (within the coverage areas, of course).
> I think the cellular carriers should invest more in improving their coverage, especially in rural areas
I would say coverage is generally pretty good, especially in the Eastern half of the country. There's very little benefit to providing service in the middle of nowhere when the majority of their subscriber base is going to be in bigger cities.
Also, you're way out of touch with how 'the youth' (anyone under 30) use the Internet. It's highly video-centric, and sure, depending on the market, keeping that video feed alive away from WiFi can get expensive: but I would rather pay than go without, and I suspect this is often true for most youngsters as well.
Cell carriers spend money where they can make money, and that isn't rural bandwidth. If we want to change that, and I think it's worthwhile to do so, it will take legislation.