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AT&T's current 5G is slower than 4G in nearly every city tested by PCMag;:
AT&T smartphone users who see their network indicators switch from "4G" to "5G" shouldn't necessarily expect that they're about to get faster speeds. In PCMag's annual mobile-network testing, released today, 5G phones connected to AT&T got slower speeds than 4G phones in 21 out of 22 cities.
PCMag concluded that "AT&T 5G right now appears to be essentially worthless," though AT&T's average download speed of 103.1Mbps was nearly as good as Verizon's thanks to a strong 4G performance. Of course, AT&T 5G should be faster than 4G in the long run—this isn't another case of AT&T misleadingly labeling its 4G network as a type of 5G. Instead, the disappointing result on PCMag's test has to do with how today's 5G phones work and with how AT&T allocates spectrum.
The counterintuitive result doesn't reveal much about the actual differences between 4G and 5G technology. Instead, it's reflective of how AT&T has used its spectrum to deploy 5G so far. As PCMag explained, "AT&T's 5G slices off a narrow bit of the old 850MHz cellular band and assigns it to 5G, to give phones a valid 5G icon without increasing performance. And because of the way current 5G phones work, it often reduces performance."
AT&T's 4G network benefits from the aggregation of channels from different frequencies. "The most recent phones are able to assemble up to seven of them—that's called seven-carrier aggregation, and it's why AT&T won [the PCMag tests] last year," the article said.
5G phones can't handle that yet, PCMag analyst Sascha Segan wrote:
But 5G phones can't add as many 4G channels to a 5G channel. So if they're in 5G mode, they're giving up 4G channels so they can use that extremely narrow, often 5MHz 5G channel, and the result is slower performance: faux G. For AT&T, using a 5G phone in testing was often a step backward from our 4G-only phone.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 15 2020, @09:38AM
なるほど
(Score: 2, Interesting) by WeekendMonkey on Tuesday September 15 2020, @10:04AM (13 children)
Looking at the coverage in the UK today it looks like someone sneezed on the map: small, unconnected coverage spots here and there centred on London. 5G may provide better capacity for those living in high population areas of major cities, but will it ever make a difference in the suburbs or small towns? Right now I can't see any reason to upgrade to 5G in the next few years.
(Score: 5, Touché) by leon_the_cat on Tuesday September 15 2020, @10:30AM
Please update to 5G sooner so I can track you more precisely.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 15 2020, @01:10PM (1 child)
Uh, duh, 5 is like, bigger than 4, and bigger is better. Besides, it's got what plants crave.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday September 15 2020, @05:05PM
I'm waiting for 12G.
https://xkcd.com/670/ [xkcd.com]
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday September 15 2020, @01:16PM
But 5G repels all known hippies!
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 1) by Trip on Tuesday September 15 2020, @01:44PM (4 children)
5G will provide a modest (20-30%) performance improvement on existing spectrum. It also has reduced latency. There are improvements, they're just not as radical and life-changing as the marketing hype would have you believe.
All that hype assumes 5G making use of microwave spectrum, in the tens of gigahertz, spectrum which is stopped dead by pretty much any obstruction.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Tuesday September 15 2020, @03:26PM
Big surprise. :)
What else is new? ;)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Tuesday September 15 2020, @04:37PM (2 children)
Doesn't 5G also require a more power-hungry radio, which then requires a significantly larger battery in your phone? My phone (LG V40) is 4G-only, but after only half a year, they replaced it with the V50, with the only real change being the addition of 5G. However, because of this change, the phone is physically larger and heavier, just to hold a bigger battery to power the 5G radio (according to what I've read); there aren't any other user-visible changes in the phone. This doesn't seem like a very worthwhile upgrade at all, unless perhaps you get a 5G phone and turn off the 5G radio on it just so you can have a phone with better battery life as long as you don't mind it being heavier and thicker.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday September 16 2020, @03:50AM (1 child)
5g is actually lower in power than 4g. right now, you're driving an f1 on a public road full of potholes. it's faster, but you're comparing shitty starting 5g infrastructure to well-established 4g. radio is hopping bands, switching between 4g and 5g, hopping towers, etc.
for the same amount of data takes less power on 5g vs 4g - with the added bonus that you can go back to sleep/downclock faster after the transmission is done.
it was the same with 4g, and 3g. for the longest time i had my phone set to 2g to save power or for just reading email and crapdot, and would only turn on 3g for youtube type stuff. then 3g got better coverage and 3g would save battery. my email would download and sync in half a second every hour and the phone would go back to sleep, vs syncing for a full minute.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 16 2020, @09:54AM
Indeed. Here in Germany (Bavaria), for the longest time I've just had 3G connection and never bothered to pay for "upgraded LTE" connection. This year, "good news", got upgraded without asking or paying since 3G has been turned off. Everywhere now I have LTE and it only drops to 2G in the middle of some forest. I wouldn't be surprised if that gets replaced with LTE soon and frequency bands get repurposed.
So yes, 5G is already deployed here in many cities but it will take some time to get proper infrastructure upgrades. This will mostly happen as end-user capabilities allow for more 5G radios.
(Score: 4, Touché) by ledow on Tuesday September 15 2020, @01:51PM (3 children)
4G isn't even used to its capacity in the UK.
Our 4G is more than capable of several hundred Mbps to every handset, even in the cities. It doesn't. Because of artificial limits and technical bottlenecks that are completely resolvable.
Countries/cities with far denser populations and far few viable cell tower locations do a far better job that the UK networks do.
5G certainly won't be anywhere near.
Sure, it's enough to run my house off 4G entirely, but it's buy no means the best the technology can do. It's positively below-average.
4G/5G isn't the bottleneck. How do you give 1Gbps to every mobile user out of the hundreds using a cell tower when it probably only has a 1Gbps leased line backing it anyway? Answer: You don't.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday September 15 2020, @10:11PM (2 children)
If you're using a cell phone in the UK you will be getting a better service for less money than almost everyone in the US (and also my country) due to the fact that you have at least some competition.
That may well change once you leave the EU properly but for the moment count yourself lucky.
(Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Wednesday September 16 2020, @04:06AM
that's complete bs - there's plenty of competition. the fact that frequencies are limited means it's best to have very few companies with spectrum - otherwise there's waste. so the infrastructure has little competition. wait till you find out how little competition there is for water pipes, wire on electric poles, and gas pipes underground.
you are free to get real cheap cell service from a whole bunch of companies - and they use one of the major carriers for infrastructure. much like how most ISPs use the fiber is in europe. consumer cellular, boost, metropcs, etc. there are plans for literally a couple of bucks per month too if you barely use your phone w/o wifi.
you want unlimited talk and text and 1GB of data? it's $10 in the US. unlimited everything is under $40. and that unlimited everything isn't like in most of europe, where after a couple of hundred meg your speed drops to 2G for the rest of the day.
so stop spreading bullshit. i've traveled all around europe and lived in catalonia and france for years. they do not have cheaper plans, and they have waaaaay shittier coverage.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday September 16 2020, @07:41AM
In the UK there are only four major cellphone tower providers.
EE, O2, Three, Vodafone.
I can assure you that they do not all compete for coverage - at least one has a terrible reputation for that.
EE is BT-owned. O2 is former-BT, now Telefonica Spain. Three and Vodafone are multi-national.
And pretty much, they all have their own basestations so coverage differs depending who you're with. They all claim to serve 99%+ of the population, but that's because their rural coverage sucks.
For some of them, 2G sucks. Even though they have 5G stations. Some of them don't have anything useful 4G/5G wise in many places. Some of them share infrastructure for basic services, but not for the 4G/5G.
So it means that many people living in large towns need to choose the one that works for us. My ex lived in a major town in the South West, and she had to drive to a local beauty spot once a week to get her text messages. Given that you're never more than 70 miles from the ocean in the UK, we aren't a big place to cover.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Tuesday September 15 2020, @02:52PM (1 child)
I've said it here before and I'll say again, 5G sucks.
Last time, y'all called me a luddite. I'm not just being grouchy about new technology. This new technology is brittle, overcomplicated, expensive, and as I predicted before, not actually any better than LTE. Even I thought that at least with a good connection, it would push slightly higher bandwidth at this early stage; apparently it's worse than this so-called luddite thought.
Is this the end? Hardly. 5G will have its applications, probably as the backbone for community-scale IoT networks. But as a technology, it is rather inappropriate for serving high speed internet to human interfaces like smartphones.
Its poor applicability for its stated purpose is enough to make me seriously (but skeptically) consider the secret police conspiracy noise from the tin-foil hat brigade.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday September 15 2020, @03:52PM
I have not experienced 5G, and probably won't for a couple years as I'm quite happy with budget phones. The one item the article did not comment on is the latency of the device. 4G is okay, but still not the same as a fiber connection. If 5G has reduced latency, I could tolerate slower total bandwidth for many applications (like telecom... the whole reason you have a phone, yes?)
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by c0lo on Tuesday September 15 2020, @03:42PM (1 child)
Coronaviruses possess the largest genomes (26.4–31.7 kb) among all known RNA viruses [sciencedirect.com]
And you need billions of them, that's some serious traffic.
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 15 2020, @08:26PM
That is some funny shit, i guess the moderator forgot about the crazy people saying 5G towers were spreading coronavirus.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Tuesday September 15 2020, @04:34PM
4G LTE is basically 4G + Sucking.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by DannyB on Tuesday September 15 2020, @05:46PM
5G must be better than 4G because 5 is better than 4.
Don't try to confuse me with technical detail mumbo jumbo. I just know that 5G is better. Verizon's ads tell me so. So it must be true. Verizon says 5G is up to 25 times faster! So it must be true, since it is in an advertisement. Advertisers would never mislead. They aren't allowed to.
Even though 5G causes covid and cancer, I think the other advantages of 5G must more than make up for that. With 5G I will be able to tweet much faster! Think how much faster I can click the like and dislike buttons!
Young people won't believe you if you say you used to get Netflix by US Postal Mail.