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From a consumer perspective, upgrading the number means "the same, simply better and faster". (just like an iphone :)
The truth is probably more complex than that.
From my experience, 4G was much more reliable that 3G has ever been. May be the service providers have improved. But I have the feeling that 4G is a fundamentally different technology from 3G. In that case, is 5G fundamentally different from 4G?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
5G is less about just faster network anyways. The goal as far as I understand is to use something like gre bonding to achieve some support for transparent handoff between base station and home network. So in theory if you are in your own wifi the network should not need to talk to your phone.
How is this different from WiFi Calling?
I was able to hit ~70mb/s over 4G several years ago (in ideal conditions). That's enough to burn through most bandwidth caps in a couple of minutes!
Even most "unlimited" plans still throttle you after some point.
I'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…
Expanding tower capacity is part of the 5G build-out. There's an upgrade spending binge going currently. The US wireless market has enough competition now, mostly thanks to T-Mobile, to force all of the carriers to properly upgrade. They're not wasting any time, all of them are aggressively pursuing it as a competitive advantage.
AT&T and Verizon have been losing customers to T-Mobile for years now. If they make the mistake of claiming 5G, when it's not, T-Mobile will just use it as an opportunity to hammer them. Competition, it works.
This also gives the large carriers in the US an opportunity to go after taking more broadband business from Comcast.
I don't know much about mobile tech, but when I heard that from a person who sits in the lab doing it, my feelings about 5G are a little mixed.
I wonder what kind of technologies are behind 3G, 4G and 5G. From a consumer perspective, upgrading the number means "the same, simply better and faster". (just like an iphone :) The truth is probably more complex than that. From my experience, 4G was much more reliable that 3G has ever been. May be the service providers have improved. But I have the feeling that 4G is a fundamentally different technology from 3G. In…
Faster speed is great, but what about bumping the data caps? I was able to hit ~70mb/s over 4G several years ago (in ideal conditions). That's enough to burn through most bandwidth caps in a couple of minutes! Even most "unlimited" plans still throttle you after some point.
I wonder what kind of technologies are behind 3G, 4G and 5G. From a consumer perspective, upgrading the number means "the same, simply better and faster". (just like an iphone :) The truth is probably more complex than that. From my experience, 4G was much more reliable that 3G has ever been. May be the service providers have improved. But I have the feeling that 4G is a fundamentally different technology from 3G. In…
5G NR is still OFDM based.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I regularly get less than 1 Mbps download on Verizon's LTE, so I have almost no hope for 5G to help this issue.
why? if the article is true then with 5G you will get 14 Mbps, which is significant improvement isn't it ?