The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill | Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found — and the race to deplo…::AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile’s race to deploy 5G has failed to realize its flashiest outcomes while saddling carriers with debt and removing a competitor from the market.

  • grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    ·
    1 year ago

    One of my most disappointing moments as an adult, which is really saying something, was getting my wife a 5g phone and realizing it was not noticeably faster in any way to the one it replaced while on a 5g network using any data service.

    • M500@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      I’m not in the US, but 5g is a noticeable and major upgrade to LTE for me.

      I had decent LTE speeds and never had a complaint, but things load instantly for me with 5g instead of the few second delay to load with LTE.

      But the biggest difference for me is that I can work off of my 5g hotspot but I couldn’t off of LTE. If WiFi dropped, I’d need to use my wife’s 5g phone before. But if she was not home, I’d just have to cancel meetings.

    • Gregorech@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 year ago

      Read an article once called the 4G lie, talked about marketing terms that you really can just make stuff up. They equated it to the car industry putting out a V6 and just calling it a V8.

  • edric@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    1 year ago

    What’s the point of breakneck speeds when you get downgraded after hitting a specific data limit. It’s like pumping water through a bigger hose but it all comes from a small bucket that turns it into a trickle when you hit the bottom.

  • TechNerdWizard42@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    This is a US problem but Americans don’t travel enough to understand.

    In the US I get shitty coverage and frequent tower handoffs to lower bandwidth signals. In a downtown capital city, I generally get 30Mbps to maybe 100Mbps outside on a clear day.

    Contrast that with where I usually am, using actual good technology and true 5G, I get fibre-like pings with 1Gbps all the time, even inside buildings. If I’m outside near a tower like in the US, I get 2Gbps nearly symmetrically. Constant excellent signal, no disconnects, no dead zones.

    It’s just sad how easily the American populace is duped. Even the article mentions how there were continuous lies and the actual rollout to 5G will take many many years. The rest of the world has already done it. Heck, even Korea has announced 6G consumer installations in the next 5 years. And if you’re by the Samsung Campus with a demo tech, you can use it now!

    • jordanlund@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      16
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      The difference between the US and Korea is VAST though.

      Korea is just over 100,000 square kilometers, slightly bigger than Indiana, slightly smaller than Virginia.

      The US is 9.834 million square kilometers. Installing infrastructure here is an order of magnitude more difficult.

      • TechNerdWizard42@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        16
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yes that’s the talking point Americans like to use as to why their infrastructure is shit. Ok so why does it work in Europe, as a continent? Why does it work in China? Why does it work in Canada? I can be in the Arctic circle not having seen another vehicle for hours on the highway and have full reception. This is in the mountains in the Arctic in a country larger than the US in an area more remote than anywhere that exists in the US.

        The reason it doesn’t work in the US is because corporate greed and a population that is ignorant to what it should be. Where’s the outcry over the billions of dollars that the ISPs lined their pockets with for the FTTH rollout and never even remotely got close to delivering, gave up, and walked away…

  • jaidyn999@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    13
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    5G mms is the high speed service. But its affected by wind, buildings and cars. And the phones that have it are expensive because the circuitry uses heaps of power and the battery is the most expensive part of the phone.

    So mms is mainly being promoted for stationary devices, and in buildings that have repeater emitters.

    The 5G low band phones are cheaper to make than 4G because the circuitry is more efficient so you can use smaller batteries.

    5G has a more efficient algorithm for ordering incoming/outgoing signals, so like-for-like there is higher speed and less freezing. But in new areas the telcos just build fewer towers so the speed is no better than 4G.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    FTA:

    “Then, it (Verizon) tried to sell us on low-band 5G, which actually turned out to be slower than 4G in some cases. The company is now slowly converting its existing network into standalone 5G as it lights up mid-band spectrum, but that’s a yearslong effort.”

    This is why I have a 5G phone and a “5G” connection, but my speeds are shit.

    14.9 down, 0.13 up.

    • Wrench Wizard@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      It’s true, I guess they only built the “5G” towers to have the name alone, figuring customers would want the latest and greatest. It’s worked, most people I see are using 5G even though every 5G network I’ve tested has yielded about the results you describe, 15mbps while I can easily get 30+ via 4glte standing in the same spot.

  • Mango@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    I pray for Mint unlimited and still struggle to load a YouTube video. This 480p limit is a fucking joke! I should just start downloading movies and shit.

    • frunch@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      13
      ·
      1 year ago

      I pray for Mint unlimited

      So how does this work, exactly? 1 Like = 1 Prayer? Or do you get on a kneeler, and that powers the Internet? I mean, i kinda understand the low bandwidth–prayer is completely wireless

    • Newby@startrek.website
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      I have mint unlimited as well and can stream YouTube just fine at full resolution. I didn’t even know there was a supposed resolution limitation.

    • chitak166@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      1 year ago

      Switch to Visible, I did and never looked back.

      It’s $25/month, but you get truly unlimited data and it will only throttle if there is congestion (which I have yet to experience.)

      Mint is a scam propped up by ryan reynolds, nothing more.

  • dorron@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I pay for 5g in London with EE with an LTE phone

    I’ve turned it off - it’s too unreliable even 3 years later… Feels like 1 bar of 5g spends an age trying to get a connection, then slowly reverts to 3 bars of 4g, which is ultimately just worse than just using 4g

    Could just be my oldish phone, or the concrete jungle, but feels like shite to me