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The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill | Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found — and the race to deplo... (www.theverge.com)
submitted 2 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill | Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found — and the race to deplo...::AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile’s race to deploy 5G has failed to realize its flashiest outcomes while saddling carriers with debt and removing a competitor from the market.

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[–] 43 points 2 years ago (3 children)

One of my most disappointing moments as an adult, which is really saying something, was getting my wife a 5g phone and realizing it was not noticeably faster in any way to the one it replaced while on a 5g network using any data service.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I mean it is more about the bandwidth I would say. Usually I get about 40 Mbps on 4g and 300 on 5g so it is a massive difference but once more people switch to it, it would drop down a lot just like 4g did. But at the end of the day its still an upgrade from 4g, can't say too much on your surrounding myself but the tech itself is still impressive.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    Usually I get about 40 Mbps on 4g and 300 on 5g

    Yeah that's pretty crap. AFAIK the record (for an actual speed test, not just a theoretical one) is 2.6Gbps and that was set a decade ago. On 4G. With Sprint by the way.

    That was obviously ideal conditions. But a good 4G connection can easily run at 300.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    That's obviously the point I made, you would never even get close to the max speeds when you are not the sole person using but as the max speed improves so does the average experience. It would be pretty naive to even expect anything close to max speed for a consumer, if that was your expectations then you will always be disappointed.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    They're saying when you have 10000 people sharing the same tower, your speeds will be better on 5G than on 4G. I have definitely noticed an improvement here at events like concerts or conventions where an assload of people are all in one location using their phones. Previously you'd be lucky to check your email while now you can still stream a video for example.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I’m not in the US, but 5g is a noticeable and major upgrade to LTE for me.

    I had decent LTE speeds and never had a complaint, but things load instantly for me with 5g instead of the few second delay to load with LTE.

    But the biggest difference for me is that I can work off of my 5g hotspot but I couldn’t off of LTE. If WiFi dropped, I’d need to use my wife’s 5g phone before. But if she was not home, I’d just have to cancel meetings.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I'm late to the party here, but wanted to chime in and say on t mobile, in the Midwest, I have a 5g phone and also t mobiles gateway for my house. The gateway is unlimited and I pay $30/month for it.

    The thing works fantastic, actually. As of this moment I'm 72Mb down, 52Mb up and 30ms latency. Latency is usually around 40. My download is normally faster, but I ran the test while my kid is streaming Netflix in the living room.

    There's no real noticeable difference for the most part just using my phone on 5g compared to what 4g did. I mean I'm sure it's faster, but outside of some big game downloads, having more than 15Mb on a phone isn't really necessary.

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