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Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

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Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#61

Post by airbreather »

It can be a factor of infrastructure as well.

When 4G first started I noticed really fast 4G service at 2am in the morning, but super slow during the day.

Most of the cells I was connecting to were in the city.

Over time as they built out the 4G infrastructure it got better, but for well over a year if you were at work and struggling to get mobile bandwidth then a switch to 3G was almost always significantly faster, double upside because everyone wanted to be on 4G and deserted the 3G bands, so no bottlenecks.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#66

Post by lxgr »

bee_rider wrote: post #56
roxgib wrote: post #50

It wouldn't be so bad if phones were better at switching to the best available signal, they they could use the efficient 5G connection when it's available, but fall back to 4G when the 5G is blocked by a building or something (which I gather is more common due to the high frequencies used in 5G). But they seem to insist on connecting to a crappy 5G signal even if an excellent 4G signal is available. Same with 3G, whi…

I wonder if 4G is better now that people who are really enthusiastic about bandwidth usage have moved up to 5G.

For most operators, spectrum is dynamically shared between LTE and 5G, so probably no.

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#68

Post by robjan »

I use 5G home broadband because I live in an old building with rusty DOCSIS 2 cables (and also because there was a risk of being sent to quarantine camp in recent years). I get a very stable 200mbit connection and can ping Google with 5-7ms latency.

Note that I live in one of the most busy parts of Hong Kong so YMMV elsewhere. In case anyone's interested, I'm using SmarTone which is the only provider in HK offering unlimited full speed 5G

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#69

Post by askvictor »

ksec wrote: post #36

OK, I will bite. Comparing 5G vs 4G as Technology is completely different to 5G vs 4G in real world implementation. That is a bit like asking if Core i9 is faster than Core i7 without knowing the clock speed, core count, cache and power budget. Or for Software developers comparing Python vs Ruby without knowing the code and VM, JIT or not Most 5G network around the world are deployed in higher frequency spectrum. Hen…

> Stand Alone 5G without relaying on 4G Network Back End

What's the difference in the backends? Is it just a question of bandwidth, or is there something more?

Re: Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

#70

Post by yieldcrv »

5g is like 50 different frequency bands

Whereas 4g was like 1 or 2 frequency bands dictated by your carrier

I agree that the user experience is worse.

shorter length of coverage gives extremely high bandwidth, while a longer range of coverage gives 4g levels of bandwidth or maybe worse

hopefully the chipset gets better, I hope this isnt a fundamental limitation

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