Is 5G really worth it?

Jabbs said:
Best speeds I had were 430mbps down, now it seems around 200-250. When it's slower times its 130's.
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The best 5G I've had travelling around London is 431 down / 51.5 up.

But then in some areas I get no connection at all :D
 
mrgubby said:
The best 5G I've had travelling around London is 431 down / 51.5 up.

But then in some areas I get no connection at all :D
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I live in West Bromwich, speeds are OK there.
At work currently and hit 200mbs.
Signal wise is ok, thrse speeds indoors.
You can tell more and more are on EE now with it.
 
chrcoluk said:
In my opinion not at the moment.

4G is almost everywhere, and if you in a city, expect very good indoor signal.

I tested out my new phone on EE's 5G network, I am in one of their declared 5G cities, I am close to the city centre, and indoors it keeps flipping between 4G and 5G, had to root the phone to fix the behaviour, and outdoors the 5G signal is weak enough that 4G has faster speeds.

When I checked a 3rd party site which gives info on the cells, out of 14 cells in my immediate area, only 2 of them have 5G enabled, all 14 have 4G and usually multiple frequencies as well. It seems 5G has been rushed so they can advertise the service, but its nowhere near as usable as 4G.
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Indeed. It has limited travel and ability to signal through objects. You get a 5G connection then turn around to see drop, so obstructions can impact connectivity a lot.

To get around this a lot of mini antenna spread around are required, eg installed in street lights, lamp posts, every spare pole. Once an area is has lots of overlapping antenna 5G, IoT's, latency based Internet access could be amazing. Not going to happen for a decade. UK is far too slow to install this stuff, especially now we can't use cheap chinese copied tech.
 
Ali195 said:
Indeed. It has limited travel and ability to signal through objects. You get a 5G connection then turn around to see drop, so obstructions can impact connectivity a lot.

To get around this a lot of mini antenna spread around are required, eg installed in street lights, lamp posts, every spare pole. Once an area is has lots of overlapping antenna 5G, IoT's, latency based Internet access could be amazing. Not going to happen for a decade. UK is far too slow to install this stuff, especially now we can't use cheap chinese copied tech.
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Yeah I cant see that been done here, kind of reminds me how BT did g.fast on the cheap just from cabinets instead of street poles.
 
The main benefit of 5g is network capacity. As someone already said it’s possible to get >100mb on 4g when it isn’t congested in a good signal area.

For phone use, going from good 4g to 5g gives the user very little benefit. Web pages might load a fraction of a second faster and 4g is already capable of streaming anything. The real benefits are that they is way more capacity on the network to handle more data streams which should result in less congestion and a better experience.

mmWave is not that useful in the real world for phones. Makes a great big number on speed test but that’s about it. Your hand can literally block mmWave from getting through making it really quite unreliable for moving objects at street level. Great for fixed antenna with line of sight though.
 
chrcoluk said:
In my opinion not at the moment.

4G is almost everywhere, and if you in a city, expect very good indoor signal.

I tested out my new phone on EE's 5G network, I am in one of their declared 5G cities, I am close to the city centre, and indoors it keeps flipping between 4G and 5G, had to root the phone to fix the behaviour, and outdoors the 5G signal is weak enough that 4G has faster speeds.

When I checked a 3rd party site which gives info on the cells, out of 14 cells in my immediate area, only 2 of them have 5G enabled, all 14 have 4G and usually multiple frequencies as well. It seems 5G has been rushed so they can advertise the service, but its nowhere near as usable as 4G.
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Please could you link the site
 
Just a bit of "5G" advice, I live in a city in Saudi with a strong 5G signal and usually get between 700mb and 1000mb speeds but back here in Stoke, which only has a few 5G areas, the speeds are far lower, still good at upto 250mb TBH, but 5G has a very wide speed range depending on signal strength.

I have the S20 FE 5G mainly for the better chipset but the 5G has been a huge change where I live normally - 2Gb game update, under a minute to d/l, 4k Netflix no problem etc.
 
Cleisthenes said:
I disabled 5G on my Pixel 5 as whenever I picked it up in London it was laggier than 4G!
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Your non-US Pixel 5 only supports 5G over existing 4G frequency bands, so you were just seeing the small subsection of their old network that your operator had switched to 5G so that they could claim “We’ve got 5G!”.
 
Terminal_Boy said:
Your non-US Pixel 5 only supports 5G over existing 4G frequency bands, so you were just seeing the small subsection of their old network that your operator had switched to 5G so that they could claim “We’ve got 5G!”.
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I didn't buy the phone for 5G so it doesn't bother me, but it is daft that they're allowed to claim that it has proper 5G when it doesn't.
 
Still waiting for a solid 4G connection before I consider thinking about 5G, incredibly inconsistent rates with Three.

When the 4G is functioning properly it's plenty fast for my needs, streaming music/videos is about all I would need the bandwidth for and the latency is a non-issue really.
 
Cleisthenes said:
I didn't buy the phone for 5G so it doesn't bother me, but it is daft that they're allowed to claim that it has proper 5G when it doesn't.
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5G is the underlying technology, not just the frequency bands. For example, almost all of the bands in use for 4G are repurposed bands used previously for 2G and 3G services.
 
For superfast 5G you need higher frequencies which travel less distance.. meaning more base stations.. that costs... and people dont want to pay twice what they do for 4G... so REAL FAST 5G will probably be restricted to City centres of larger cities... Sure, you will see 5G symbols on your phone but when connected to low frequency 5G which means low speed...

I wouldnt worry about getting 5G ... I certainly wouldnt spend a penny extra on a 5G specific phone.

But I'm just an RF engineer ;)
 
jrwagh333 said:
Sounds good. I've been fortunate enough to love in a Virgin Media area for years so I've always had good speeds.
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Same VM used to be fantastic round here, sadly its utter rubbish now. Had endless engineers out, over subscribed I guess.
 
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