If your experience has been that 5G is slow compared to the speeds that have been promised in carriers’ marketing hype, according to experts, that’s no surprise – especially in the case of Verizon and AT&T, 9to5Mac reports.
We’ve noted before that some of what carriers claim is 5G is really a blend of 4G and 5G known as dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS)…
One analyst cited by The Verge doesn’t mince any words when it comes to describing DSS.
To understand the complicated 5G situation in the US right now, you first need to know that there are low-, mid-, and high-band frequencies that carriers can use. Low-band is slower but offers widespread coverage. High-band, often called mmWave, is very fast but extremely limited in range. Mid-band sits in a sweet spot between the two, with good range and better-than-LTE speeds.
If you were building a 5G network from scratch, you’d probably want a bunch of mid-band spectrum, right? The trouble is, spectrum is a limited resource. Sascha Segan, lead mobile analyst at PCMag and a wealth of 5G knowledge, sums up part of the spectrum problem.
“Our government did not make the right channels available to the carriers,” he says. “Verizon and AT&T have basically just been using leftover odds and ends of their 4G spectrum… putting the 5G encoding on these leftover bits and bobs so they can pop a 5G icon on the screen. And the performance is meaningless.”
MacDailyNews Take: But, all hope is not lost. Allison Johnson reports for The Verge, “We’ve been promised a fourth industrial revolution with fantastical things like remote surgery and driverless cars. Instead, what we have now is widespread 5G that’s more or less the same speed as (or even slower than) 4G and super-fast mmWave 5G in some parts of some major cities with highly limited range. So where is this 5G future we’ve been promised? The truth is that it’s coming along, but it will materialize more slowly and in less obvious ways than what we’ve been led to believe.” Read more in the full article here.
Yes, it’s slow. Very slow. On my 12 Pro Max it is slower than my previous 10 was. My iPhone 10 Max or whatever it was was a beautiful phoine that regularly got speeds in excess of 80Mb/s down. My new 12 Pro Max which is also a beautiful device can’t quite manage 60Mb/s down when set for 5G.
So I’ve turned it off to save battery power. I check it every so often to see if anything has improved. I just tried it now. It got 25Mb/s. Ironically it’s gotten progressively worse. So yes, the rush to 5G has been the second biggest scam of 2020 so far.
If you have an iPhone 10 or 11, honestly, there is nothing compelling about the 12. It’s just as nice a phone as the 10 or 11 but does not exceed the capabilities of those previous phones in any drastically measurable way. The cost is too high for what you get.
I can almost guarantee that an upgrade to yet another 5G phone will be required to experience the promised speed. I also don’t know about Verizon, but my monthly cost went up dramatically even after dumping my AppleWatch and iPad off the bill! AT&T forces you off their lower data plans and makes you sign up for the much more expensive Unlimited Data Plan, (which is really capped and they will throttle you), if you want 5G.
I’ve run into a few people who bought the new phones, and see the 5Ge symbol and believe themselves to be on 5G also, because they don’t realize they need the higher data plan to be allowed on the 5G network.
“…to experience the promised speed.”
NEVER going to happen. This so called 5G revolution is way too much hype. The max speed are the instantaneous speeds. Users are time division duplexed with other users. Thus if 100 users are using the same channel bonding you are you only get 1/100 of the theoretical throughput, max. (In reality you’ll get slightly less than that.) The max speeds also assume the maximum channel bonding, which rarely happens, either due to the mismatch of device to tower or limitations in the tower’s implementation.
IF (an unlikely scenario ever)
you are the only 5G user in the cell and,
the tower with which you are communicating has enough of a backhaul,and
your devicecompletely matches the tower’s frequency and channelization planand
, the weather is relatively cle,ar an
d you’re not on the cell ed (so you have a strong signal)ge, an
d there are no interferers in the cell, the
n you MIGHT get near the theoretical peak
. Otherwise forget it.
5G has been hyped to a completely unattainable level. To hear some of the hype 5G is going to do everything but cook my dinne and do my laundry for mer, and maybe even that.
Wow. MDN’s system really butchered that formatting. I hope people can figure it out. I’m not doing it again.
5g is just WiFi owned by the cell network. They found a way to charge us for what we already had.
It’s crap because during snovid in Texas last week it was entirely useless. Had to resort to old 3G phones in order to make anything work. The 5g phones couldn’t dumb down enough to use the 3G signal. Fortunately I had a mifi that used 3G and could get some information. When the power goes out the 5g is worse than dial up…..
Unfortunately, the carriers will soon be decommissioning their 3G networks so that they can allocate the frequencies to 5G.