Some of what you may have heard about the range and such might not be about 5G phone networks but 5G wifi. Any range differences aren't really even gonna be noticed compared to 4G most of the time.
5G(hz) wifi has more capacity and is faster, but has limited range and doesn't penetrate walls as well as 2.4GHz
I think this must be what's happening. 5G cell is equal or better than 4G cell in almost all ways. And if your phone is set to dynamically switch between 4g and 5g depending on what's best at any given moment then there's literally no downside, only upsides
mmWave 5G can have much worse signal strength than 5G running in the 700-2400MHz spectrum. Its range is much shorter and it gets disturbed by air particles like rain. With that said, I don't know if one could get only mmWave reception or whether mmWave can be used only in addition to 700-2400MHz for speed augmentation. 🤔
IME rain and humidity has little to no effect. I can get 900mbps in clear skies or in a torrential downpour as long as I’m not behind multiple walls. The single wall I have to contend with at work (not counting cube walls) barely affects reception. If I’m standing under the tower I can get 1gbps.
That's probably not going through mmWave signal but the sub-mmWave spectrum we've previously used for 4G. I've hit >400Mbps on good ol' LTE back in 2018 on AWS.
The most widely used form of 5G, sub-6 GHz 5G (mid-band), is capable of delivering data rates ranging from 10 to 1,000 megabits per second (Mbps) [1]
According to this, 5G should be able to do 1Tb on sub-mmWave.
On paper 5G is better: less power, better SNR, longer ranges.
The problem is the frequency spectrum: the higher the frequencies, the more bandwidth but the worst range. And it's very crowded.
5G has been mostly deployed in the upper spectrum and mmwave in really crowded city downtowns, in part to show off the speeds reliably but also cell density and the fact there's nothing on those frequencies, they can just deploy them. The problem is those gigabit speeds are only possible on the high frequencies, therefore it costs range. It's exactly like 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi.
When it comes to the longer ranges, you want the lower frequencies, but the problem is the good spectrum is all used by TV, 3G and 4G already! And they're long range so you need more spacing to prevent interference. So they have to deploy 5G on the less desirable spectrum, at least for now, until they can get rid of 3G in full and free up space for 5G on the lower bands. Technically 5G can also be mixed with 4G, but because it has to share you lose a lot of benefits when lots of 4G clients are connected, like the variable channel sizes and multiple devices talking at the same time.
So the real world result, currently, is sometimes it's about as good because it's sharing with 4G, sometimes it's bad because it's on the higher frequencies that can't go through walls as well, and if you're lucky, 3G has been fully removed and reallocated and you have pretty solid 5G. It was the same thing with 4G: 3G was taking the best spectrum, so 4G was originally often worse than 3G before they had enough 4G antennas and got rid of 2G and took its spectrum for 4G.
Plus, we know carriers are good at taking good tech and making it needlessly shitty our outright misleading like AT&T's 5Ge thing or Comcast's attempt at "10G" network. They're rather your phone show the 5G logo than let you stay on 4G even if the signal is better there, and that makes people think 5G kinda sucks.
One of the things 5G wanted to accomplish is serve IoT devices far away with low power, by using small channels and low data rates without affecting the high bandwidth devices on the same tower. They thought about range and device count a lot this round. It's just, faster is the feature people talk about the most, the rest is just technical stuff is a bit too hard to digest for the average consumer.
Frequency 101. The higher the frequency the better the range, the worse the penetration through buildings/solid matter. Technically this is sort of a misnomer because the frequency transmitted keeps on traveling pretty much forever but the higher the frequency the more concentrated the beam of transmission, the farther away it can be picked up because transmitted frequencies spread as they travel.
Some really good comments here. It definitely all depends on the frequency band your phone connects to. At lower frequencies such as 700 megahertz with skinny channels the 5G speeds will be no better than 4G and LTE. However, at the higher frequencies like 2.5 gigahertz, 3.7 gigahertz, etc. and up into the millimeter wave, they are super short frequencies and do not penetrate walls and stuff well, but are way faster. This leads to tighter tower grids in order to penetrate buildings with that higher frequency. That also means less people per tower taking up your bandwidth. A tower that can go 10 miles (700 megahertz) will have a lot more users on it than a tower that will go half a mile for example.
Edit: Another thing is that tighter tower grids make for better wireless emergency alerts. Imagine a tornado warning being sent to a tower that covers 10 miles. Every one in that 10 mile tower footprint would get the warning. Whereas typically tornadoes are tiny. And a tower that covers half a mile getting a tornado warning would mean that that tornado is a lot closer to you.
Yeah I dont think I'll ever understand these weird 5g skepticism threads. I do get better battery life on lte than 5g and building penetration means a lot more switching between bands(an issue specifically with my pixel's radio) but similar issues existed with with lte and 3g when they launched. I guess the difference is LTE already has speeds and latency enough for people to get by.
And yeah on lte you're already getting 10-60mbps down so for most use cases you probably dont notice a huge difference in speed while browsing social media, and watching youtube. But having a network with higher speeds and more bandwidth is better for handling congestion. If you live in an area where the 5g is unreliable or your phone has poor support for it then you can just switch to lte while things keep cooking.
And will also mean better tracking of phone users, as we have a better resolution with more towers
Which isn't a good thing always at least...
Yeah, that's definitely a fair point. Though I am not sure how much better it would get since triangulation between three different towers or more has been used already to narrow down where a device is even with long distance towers.
I don’t feel it’s a downgrade at all. I get nearly as good download as my home connection and significantly faster upload. Never had any issues with 5G or 5G UC. T-mobile and iPhones.
Yeah 5g has been decent enough for me to stream games to my phone with steamlink
The problem is true 5G is high frequency and very low range, requiring towers everywhere. Also realistically we don't even need these speeds on mobile devices, what it should've been is a better 4G with more reliability and better performance in crouded areas.
I guess it really depends on your area. I hear stories that it's the bee's knees and then other ones where the signal is so congested, especially if using a mvno. Personally I'm sticking with 4g, in my area 5g is about the same in speed unless you want to stay up til like 4am to get a decent boost.
The problem is most services advertising 5G don't actually meet 5G specifications.
It's cool though, because the same thing happened with 4G and 3G.
A lot of it not only depends on your provider, but the cell tower you connect to.
5G at my home is trash tier, but it doesn't matter because I'm on WiFi at home.
20.2 down, 0.37 up. :(
Eh, if the network is in place, it's great. Better speeds, more stable connections (for me anyway), and that's definitely something 4g lacked overall.
The problem is that 5g hasn't reached saturation where you can guarantee it everywhere, and downtime away from cities can be longer than on previous network standards.
It is difficult to quantify stability as an end user though. I can only be certain about my experience, and that of people I have enough contact with to experience their use of their connection. That's a very small amount of sampling.
That being said, 5g has been miles better for me. I can't remember the last time it was down, and we're in the boonies relatively speaking. Small town, house on the edge of town. Back before 5g got rolled out, data was useless here at home, and only slightly better in town as a whole. Same at my best friend's house in the city, and in other towns with family.
Now? I can stream whatever I want over data with no issues. That's a massive improvement.
Now, how much of that was just them actually implementing 5g well and the 4g having been done shitty? No clue. But considering the multiple places I've used my data plan, and what others I trust to not be idiots have said, it is probably the 5g just being better as a technology.
I don't really notice a difference from 5G data compared to 4G
Well, the 5G signal itself is better.
It is different from 4G, so it does require reevaluating infrastructure placement.
The same thing happened with 4G. It is weaker than 3G, but faster.
Same thing with 5Ghz wifi. It is weaker, but faster, than 2.4Ghz.
A motorcycle gets better gas mileage, more nimble, and less space than a car or truck. But there is a lot you can't haul on a motorcycle.
For me speed increase is pretty significant. Testing with Ookla's Speedtest I get around 60-100 Mbps download with 4G and around 300 - 500 for 5G so sometimes it's faster that my Wi-Fi which usually is around 300 - 400.
Realistically though I do not feel this difference, 4G seems enough. Do not see significant difference in battery life as well. In the past I think 5G did eat more battery where I am so I stayed on 4G for a long time before trying 5G again.
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