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- cross-posted to:
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It seemed like a bunch of hype from the beginning to me. I looked up the specs of my old Motorola phone from 2017 back when 5G was a new topic, and the 4G LTE modem in that old phone is capable of 600Mb data speeds. But no 4G LTE connection ever gave me much more than 40-50Mb on speed tests.
5G rolled out and I have a 5G phone (not because it’s 5G but because it’s my new phone) and whenever I do a speed test, the results are no better than 4G LTE. But there was a trade-off for the “upgrade” to 5G - the cell towers for 5G have much less range than the 4G ones do. So not only do I receive no improvement in speed but the towers’ range is downgraded.
There’s physics reasons that 5g is theoretically faster, while also having lower range. It’s related to the frequency used. All other things being equal, higher frequency radio waves attenuate faster in any given medium than lower frequency waves. (Their range would effectively be identical in a vacuum.) But, the total number of waves you can transmit in any given period is inversely proportional to attenuation.
As you approach a bitrate that is equal to the frequency, you start to run up against the limits of physics in terms of how much information you can transmit. Choosing a frequency arbitrary to illustrate: 900 MHz. At 900MHz, there are 900 million waves going out per second. In some perfect universe, you could turn the signal on/off up to 900 million times per second, giving you a theoretical bitrate of 900Mbit, or 112MB/s. In reality, you never approach this limit, due to error correction and a bunch of other things, so you might get a tenth of that speed as your practical maximum from an engineering perspective. So maybe 10MB/s. There are other tricks you can do, like MIMO on multiple adjacent frequencies, but that is a digression.
But if you go from 900 MHz to 2.4GHz, you automatically gain a reprieve from the physics, allowing you to potentially gain 2.7x the speed. Amazing! Only, now the signal is absorbed by materials 2.7x faster, and has trouble penetrating through walls as well and such. Yikes!
So you have a tradeoff. 4G is a lower frequency than 5G. 5G makes more sense in very dense open environments: stadiums, concerts, busy outdoor markets, etc. where you need a lot of bandwidth in a small area without a lot of obstacles. 4G will penetrate the walls of your house better, at lower theoretical top speeds. Phones can and should switch to whatever is optimal for the environment you’re in.
We’re near the limit of physics on these things and I don’t expect things will evolve a lot more from here.
I think you might be talking about 5G mmWave which is really high frequency and really impractical in most cases due to requiring clear line of sight. Other than that 5G is used on the same bands / frequencies that 4G is and it’s just utilizing them slightly better.
Ah, you’re probably right.
Similar experience here. I rely on mobile broadband for home internet and was okay for many years on LTE. Speeds up to 110mbps, at worst 30mbps during peak hours.
Around a year ago my carrier installed 5G equipment on a local tower (300 meters away), I got a €300 5G modem/router and for a brief moment got whopping 130mbps. Not the best purchase but at least I’m future-proof, I thought.
Then network stability went to the toilet. It’s a bit better when I disable 5G (🙃). I thought it might be my new modem but old one has same issues. My guess 5G equipment is not only overhyped but also buggy as hell. Obviously anecdotal evidence and ymmv.
just did a fast.com speed test at work, where I’ve got both 4G and 5G coverage. 30 Mbps on 4G, 12 Mbps on 5G.
What network are you on? T-Mobile pretty much has the only true 5G network and it’s much quicker than LTE. The rest of the carriers are still upgrading from their LTE backhauls.
I never needed more than 4G on the go. I wouldn’t mind 5G but I won’t pay extra for it especially because the data caps are always too low.
I think 4G was a lot of speed for mobile devices but I must say the speeds on 5G are quite impressive. I can get about 50-70mbit/s with 4G on my phone while 5G does 300+. Do I ever need that? No.
I think it would have been better to invest in better coverage with 4G.
And now everywhere we have cell towers sticking out of the ground with little consideration for where it is.
This is 5g, sitting inside a house with aluminum siding in the very spot where I never saw above 5mbit with 4g. Far from hype.
Not really, my old Motorola from 2017 could have beat that speed tests with its 600Mb capable modem, if the telephone carriers wanted to grant that much bandwidth.
It’s all about their shitty implementation. What you think is a “5G speed” was already possible long ago but they didn’t let us have it.
The 2 main benefits of 5G are better latency and more efficient spectrum use.
The promises of massive speed boosts are mostly marketing and the potential of using new pieces of spectrum
The promises of massive speed boosts were met. 5g is insanely fast compared to 4g in my area, and I don’t live in a massive metropolitan area.
LTE with carrier aggregation can get almost as fast as any 5G that I have tested so far.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Verizon and AT&T wrote massive checks for new spectrum licenses, and T-Mobile swallowed another network whole because it was very important to make the 5G future happen as quickly as possible and win the race.
CES 2024 is just around the corner, and while telecom executives were eager to shout about 5G to the rafters just a few years ago, you’ll probably be lucky to hear so much as a whisper about it this time around.
But deploying 5G at the breakneck speeds required to win an imaginary race resulted in one fewer major wireless carrier to choose from and lots of debt to repay.
One problem standing in the company’s way, RCR Wireless News editor-in-chief Sean Kinney explains to The Verge, is that carriers aren’t really set up to sell their services to specific industries.
It’s nice for people to have more than one option for high-speed internet, but it’s hardly robot surgery — it’s not even necessarily the best way to improve the dismal state of home broadband.
And according to founder Charlie Ergen on the company’s last earnings call, of those 7.5 million people, the “vast majority” don’t have a phone that works on Dish’s own network.
The original article contains 1,743 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 89%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
