Thinking of buying a new phone for high-speed 5G? Do yourself a favor: don't do it.
Who doesn't want fast internet and great bandwidth? Everybody wants. Ideally, everyone wants gigabit fiber optic cables to come to their doorstep or office. Maybe someday it will. What won't be gigabit speeds per second from 5G. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever.
At the moment, telecom companies say many things in one advertisement after another that are not true. But even by their standards, 5G is fake.
Let's start with the name itself. There is no single “5G”. There are actually three varieties with very different characteristics.
Firstly, it is 5G low band that offers wide coverage. One tower can cover hundreds of square miles. It's not a speed demon, but even 20+ Mbps is a hell of a lot better than the 3 Mbps that rural DSL adheres to. And in ideal situations, this can give you 100+ Mbps speeds.
Then there is mid-range 5G, operating in the 1GHz to 6GHz band and has roughly half the coverage of 4G. You can hope to get speeds in the 200 Mbps range. If you are in the United States, you most likely will not encounter it. It is being deployed only by T-Mobile , which inherits Sprint 's 2.5GHz mid-range 5G.... However, it is slow because most of its potential bandwidth is already being used.
But what most people want is 1 Gbps speed with less than 10 milliseconds latency. According to a new NPD study , about 40% of iPhone users and 33% of Android users are highly or highly interested in 5G gadgets. They want that speed and they want it now. And 18% of them even say they understand the difference between the types of 5G networks.
Doubtful. Because if they really understood that, they wouldn't be in such a rush to buy a 5G smartphone. You see, to get that kind of speed, you have to have a 5G millimeter-long radio wave - and that comes with a lot of caveats.
First, such waves have a maximum range of 150 meters. If you are driving a car, this means that until 5G base stations are all over the place, you will be losing your high speed signal a lot. In fact, in the next few years, if you're driving, you won't be able to enjoy high-speed 5G.
And even if you're in range of a 5G base station, whatever - window glass, wood, wall, etc. - can block its high frequency signal. So a 5G transceiver might be on the corner of your street and you might not be able to get a normal signal.
How bad is it? NTT DoCoMo, a leading mobile service provider in Japan, is working on a new kind of window glass that allows millimeter 5G to pass through. But it's unlikely that most people will want to shell out a few thousand dollars to replace windows just to get the phone to work.
Suppose, however, that you have a 5G phone and are confident that you can access 5G - what kind of performance can you really count on? According to Washington Post technical columnist Jeffrey A. Fowler , 5G can be expected to be "awkward." Sounds believable, you can believe it:
“Try AT&T at 32 Mbps with a 5G smartphone and 34 Mbps with a 4G smartphone. On T-Mobile I got 15 Mbps on 5G and 13 Mbps on my 4G smartphone. " He was unable to verify Verizon. But his 4G smartphone was faster than his 5G smartphone.
Indeed, OpenSignal reports that the average speed of 5G users in the US is 33.4 Mbps. Better than 4G, but not “Wow! This is cool! ”That most people dream of. This is much worse than any other country using 5G except the UK.
Also, you only get 5G 20% of the time. Unless you live or work near a millimeter wave transceiver, you simply won't see the promised speeds or anything close to them. Honestly, don't expect high-speed 5G to become widely available before 2025. And even when that day arrives, it is doubtful that we will all see real gigabit second speeds.
The original article can be found here .