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Comment by klrefg | Hacker News Reader

2G -> 3G -> 4G were all massive jumps that all enabled new use cases.

I doubt majority of phone users who have a decent 4G connection would notice the difference if they upgrade to 5G.

It's either that or people complaining about "Now I can run out of data much faster". But what people forget is that not all the new tech is to improve it for a single subscriber. A lot of it is to utilize the spectrum better and in that way get more capacity for everyone. Basically, if everyone was on 4G, it would be clogged and slow for everyone.

In Germany telcos using 700MHz for 5G a lot (also for LTE in non-5G regions and sometimes with DSS). So they can create a lot of coverage on rural areas or building penetration.

Telefonica didn't set their signallevel-to-bars-parameters on their SIMs correctly yet. Even directly next to a antenna you only see 1-2 bar although the signal level is maxing out.

700MHz is a mixed bag for rural coverage. Great for punching through trees, but need very tall towers to overcome destructive fresnel lens losses. Higher frequencies are usually better here + more gain!

For rural areas, lower frequencies are better because they mean longer distances ↝ fewer cell towers but also less density.

Conversely, higher frequencies mean more density, shorter distances and more cell towers. The ROI in the rural scenario in this case is lower.

I feel like 5g is worse

In terms of signal level?

Well.. that amount of bars you can see depending on the real signal level is just a SIM configuration. In the "newer" networks they aren't configured properly yet.

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