T-Mobile austria did the same a few days ago. They achieved 3ms latency to a drone which they were remote controlling and 2Gbit. https://www.flickr.com/photos/t-mo-austria/sets/721576693479... https://newsroom.t-mobile.at/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/1802...
Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase
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Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase
#12I'm not disputing 5G is faster, but was congestion taken into account for this test? 4G for me is noticeably slower than when I first got a 4G phone, primarily because the network has become more congested as it became the mainstream.
Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase
#13What standard is this now? Last time I tried to read up on 5G, it was described as a collection of ideas for a new standard rather than one specific technology. IS this still the case (i.e. different companies work on competing technologies) or does 5G by now mean the same for all companies?
There are still work to do but you will see small scale deployments at the end of 2018 and first phones and consumer devices start to arrive 2019-2020.
Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase
#145G can be deployed with much more spectrum than 4G can be. Deployed with 60-80MHz of spectrum, US carriers have shown off LTE north of 700Mbps. The article said that they were using the 3.5GHz band, but they didn't say how much spectrum they were using which makes the comparison incredibly suspect. Do an image search for "T-Mobile gigabit" or "Sprint gigabit" and you'll see plenty of tests in areas where the companies have a lot of spectrum in a small area doing very high speed.
AT&T and Verizon are planning on launching 5G with hundreds of MHz of spectrum in millimeter wave bands. That spectrum won't travel far and will have difficulty going through walls, but will have lots of capacity given how much they have.
By contrast, LTE deployments are usually in the range of 10-80MHz. Given the low 50Mbps speed of their 4G test, it seems like they didn't use much spectrum at all for 4G. If they had a reasonable LTE setup with 80MHz of spectrum in 4xCA, 256QAM, and 4x4 MIMO, they should easily beat 500Mbps and probably get closer to 800Mbps. The low LTE speed makes me conclude that they're just looking to promote Elisa (the wireless operator that worked with the newspaper to do the test) and set it up to just make for a good article.
What I want is a comparison between LTE and 5G NR that uses the same amount of spectrum in the same band. 5G NR is likely to have new applications with millimeter wave and very high order MIMO, but that won't work at the lower frequencies that are used to create broad coverage. In the 500-2,000MHz range with the same amount of spectrum, how much faster is 5G NR?
Now, 5G NR is said to have some great benefits in terms of latency and power use for low-bandwidth devices on top of bandwidth increases, but people aren't showing off real comparisons yet.
Also, just to see how bad a test of LTE this was, average speeds at the super bowl were over 50Mbps for three carriers: http://bgr.com/2018/02/05/t-mobile-vs-verizon-fastest-networ.... I mean, T-Mobile was able to top 120Mbps in a real-world situation. They couldn't beat 50Mbps on an unloaded LTE network? That just sounds like they gave it very little spectrum. Heck, Ookla notes that average nationwide speeds are 31.58Mbps for T-Mobile, 23.83Mbps for Sprint, 24.39Mbps for AT&T, and 28.21Mbps for Verizon. That's an average that includes places with bad coverage and such. 50Mbps is a very low LTE performance number in a lab which just makes it feel suspect.
Now, it could be that 5G NR, like UMTS in its early days, has a lot more room for improvement. UMTS launched at 384kbps which wasn't extremely faster than EDGE and 1xRTT, but did have big latency benefits. A little later, it was pushed further and eventually got as high as 42Mbps (theoretical). Sometimes they kinda exaggerate the early tests because the technology is really better over the long run, but it will take some time to get there.
Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase
#15I'm not disputing 5G is faster, but was congestion taken into account for this test? 4G for me is noticeably slower than when I first got a 4G phone, primarily because the network has become more congested as it became the mainstream.
And related to that, how many towers currently have the bandwidth capacity at their base to support this new throughput at scale? All this may do is shift the bottleneck from between handset & tower, to the tower's own infrastructure. Mobile vendors won't mind because your phone will say "5G" in the status bar and they can charge more. But in reality your phone to web-site performance (particularly outside of artific…
Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase
#16I'm not disputing 5G is faster, but was congestion taken into account for this test? 4G for me is noticeably slower than when I first got a 4G phone, primarily because the network has become more congested as it became the mainstream.
I actually think the home market would be an ideal place for them to start, as its much less 'mobile' so if you get coverage, your not going to have spotty coverage while they fill in the gaps.
Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase
#17I'm not disputing 5G is faster, but was congestion taken into account for this test? 4G for me is noticeably slower than when I first got a 4G phone, primarily because the network has become more congested as it became the mainstream.
I regularly get less than 1 Mbps download on Verizon's LTE, so I have almost no hope for 5G to help this issue.
Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase
#18Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase
#19Re: Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase
#20I'm not disputing 5G is faster, but was congestion taken into account for this test? 4G for me is noticeably slower than when I first got a 4G phone, primarily because the network has become more congested as it became the mainstream.
It doesn't look like they considered substantial congestion for either 4G LTE or 5G, which should mean that while the specific bandwidth numbers may not hold up, the speed ratio should be comparable in production. You can see that they evaluate LTE at 50Mbps, which is around what Verizon phones were getting when they first started going to market but before congestion and backhaul limitations were hit due to the numb…
Which is going to put a lot of pressure on ISP's to improve.