Opensignal’s latest 5G analysis found that all ten carriers measured saw much faster speeds for their users on 5G compared with 4G, with speeds between 18.4 times and 1.7 times faster on 5G. However, average 5G download ratess also varied widely, ranging between 506.1 Mbps on Verizon down to 47 Mbps on T-Mobile US.
The time that users spent connected to 5G — 5G Availability — also varied greatly between operators, reaching a high of 19.8% of the time on T-Mobile US, indicating that while T-Mobile 5G speeds may not be the fastest, their users will experience the higher 5G speeds considerably more often than the users of other 5G operators.
Opensignal’s findings highlighted the differences between the type of 5G spectrum offered by each operator. Of the ten operators analyzed, Verizon is the only one to exclusively use mmWave spectrum and this is the main reason for the extremely high speeds our 5G users have observed on its network. Similarly, the two operators here whose users had the slowest 5G speeds both primarily relied upon low-band spectrum re-purposed from 4G services — 600Mhz for T-Mobile US and 850Mhz for AT&T — which offers extremely good coverage but less capacity and slower average speeds. All the other operators relied on mid-band spectrum for their 5G services.
Although Australia’s Telstra, all three of South Korea’s operators, Sprint in the U.S. and the U.K.’s EE and Vodafone have all deployed 5G on mid-band spectrum, users’ speeds differed greatly from well over 200 Mbps on all three Korean operators, to 114.2 Mbps on Sprint. In part, this speed difference is because of the amount of 5G spectrum available to deploy — wider channels are better, ideally 100Mhz in a single 5G band — but it’s also due to other differences in the networks such as the capacity of the onward connection from each cell site or the performance of each operator’s core network.
As the new T-Mobile combines the assets of Sprint, Opensignal expects to see the average 5G speed of new T-Mobile users rising as they benefit from the mid-band 5G spectrum which Sprint has deployed.
More info via Opensignal here.
VZ is completely ass where I live and I’ve been a VZ customer for almost 2 decades! Rest of my family is now on ATT—considering the jump on the next iPhone iteration..
Good luck with that! Horrible service and network. I’m no fan of Verizon but moved over to them 7 years ago and never looked back
Dang, Verizon/Comcast is one of my LEAST favorite companies in the universe.
I despise Comcast. No worse company on the planet not even General Motors and they are trash
It doesn’t matter how fast something is if you have to be within a hundred feet of it in only very very selected locations, lol.
Mm wave may be the urban future, but it’s a pretty far future. It’s more likely to find success in fixed point home networks as a cable internet replacement in the midterm.
It’s not quite that bad, but mmwave is essentially line of sight. A large building between you and the tower means no mmwave use. So even in urban situations there will have to be “towers” on buildings within line of sight to make mmwave truly functional (hence the “micro cell” concept.
Additionally, mmwave is very susceptible to environmental conditions. A decent rainstorm and mmwave goes away. (The energy in the RF radiation is absorbed by the rain in the air.)
I would say that if Verison is only going to do 5G as mmwave and non of the sub 6 GHz frequencies that Verizon is not going to provide a reliable 5G offering to its customers.
There’s something I don’t understand, here in Italy, in Rome with VodafoneIT, reached 167mbps download speed and 19,7 upload in January 17th 2017, with standard LTE on an iPhone 7. These day with the Covid all the connection are slower than usual, too smart work connection and streaming service, but the download speed is still between 34 / 77 mbps.