OT: Does anyone else feel like 5G cell service blows?
- Thread starter DesotoCountyDawg
- Start date
Who’s the provider? Slight hijack, but I’m considering switching from C Spire to AT&T, so I’m curious if AT&T’s 5g is terrible.
I have Verizon and this is a direct quote from their webpage:
5G Ultra Wideband is our high performing 5G —up to 10x faster than typical 4G LTE speeds. It is available in select areas. 5G Nationwide has similar performance rates to 4G LTE and is improving.
If you then look at their coverage map the 5g ultra wideband in in very few places and only in cities. Covers like 13% of the US. So yeah to your question.
5G Ultra Wideband is our high performing 5G —up to 10x faster than typical 4G LTE speeds. It is available in select areas. 5G Nationwide has similar performance rates to 4G LTE and is improving.
If you then look at their coverage map the 5g ultra wideband in in very few places and only in cities. Covers like 13% of the US. So yeah to your question.
So here's why (and this is not particularly carrier-specific, it's the same whenever there's some new technology no matter who is deploying it): Whenever there's a new technology, whether it was GSM over TDMA, UMTS over GSM, or then LTE over UMTS, and now 5G over LTE, there's a couple of things in play on deployment speed.
One is the speed of actually being able to deploy the new technology, whether it requires new transmitters on towers, or software updates, or whatever. If new hardware is required, it takes forever to deploy it. Over a year typically from when the designs are issued to construction complete, generally. The other is the actual number of devices in the network capable of actually using the new technologies. Sure you might have the newest iPhone 14 or whatever the latest Samsung is, with all the bells and whistles, but there's just as many people out there somehow still rocking an iPhone 5.
So AT&T or CSpire or Verizon may have 5G available, but the actual demand on the network for 5G services is still far less than demand for LTE. That means the amount of radio spectrum bandwidth devoted to the new technology is still a pretty small fraction of all the bandwidth each carrier has available. And each carrier only has a finite amount of bandwidth available in each market, and they have to be smart about they divvy that out to serve their ENTIRE customer base. So if you're on the front end of things, that might suck, but you're still in the minority of users at the moment.
The good news is, as time passes and old phones get traded for new the demand for 5G will grow and spectrum will be shifted around until ultimately 5G becomes the prevailing technology, at which point you'll probably be here bitching about how your new 6G phone seems really slow.
[Disclaimer: I work in network engineering for one of the companies mentioned here, and while I'm only specifically knowledgable about one of them, I feel confident all are in the same boat, because we always have been.]
I read somewhere Tmoblie has one of the lower bandwidths given by the government and it was touted as being able to penetrate walls and other structures more easily. I live in Birmingham and have tmobile and I cant tell a difference between 5G and my wifi. Both are fast.
5G UWB goes about as far as your home Wi-Fi signal does "in select areas" which are basically areas with hundreds of thousands of people. Walk a block away and it's back to regular cell service like everyone else. It's impossible to deploy it in 99% of the land area we live and travel in.
Your home wifi signal is actually probably on-par with 5G using C-band, as C-band in the 3.4 GHz range and your wifi is around 5 GHz....5g using mmWave is up in the 20-30 GHz range, which is virtually useless for coverage. This stuff is for providing bandwidth and capacity in dense areas, not for coverage in any way. mmWave is virtually useless unless your device is line-of-sight to the transmitter. It can tolerate almost no obstructions in the transmit path.
I'm in the Starkville area most of the time and don't think I've ever even seen 5G indicator pop up, only 4G LTE
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