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Chippy_Tea

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My new phone has 5G but I wasn't aware we had 5G round here, sat in ASDA car park I noticed the icon switch from 4G to 5G so I ran speed test and got 138 Mbps, I can see a lot of people getting rid of their landlines when 5G coverage becomes as common as 4G.

Can you connect to 5G, what speeds do you get?
 
My new phone has 5G but I wasn't aware we had 5G round here, sat in ASDA car park I noticed the icon switch from 4G to 5G so I ran speed test and got 138 Mbps, I can see a lot of people getting rid of their landlines when 5G coverage becomes as common as 4G.

Can you connect to 5G, what speeds do you get?
I've seen nearly 1Gig with my 5G
 
I've seen nearly 1Gig with my 5G


I checked coverage when i got home and it would appear there is no 5G at ASDA (red star on map) it was definitely showing 5G on my phone and 138 Mbps is a huge jump in speed from what i normally get there.

There is an ARGOS close to the store and they have a free o2 Wi-Fi hotspot but i didnt need to sign up or anything so i dont think it could be that.

1703008132901.png
 
Wish I could get 3G in my village.

I do not think it will be overtaking FTTC or FTTP anytime soon due to latency, NAT and data restrictions.
 
It won't be the end of fibre landlines.

All that 5g speed will be shared between all the users on that cell.
Even if the base station was infinitely fast, it would be limited by the speed of its backbone connection (fibre connection to it) divided by number of active users.

You can see this in action in 4g areas with high population & nimby culture that limits number of masts. Even though you have 4g, data rate is rubbish as it's shared between too many & it would probably be faster to drop back to 3g data.

So your great 5g speeds now will get diluted in a couple of years when everyone has a 5g phone.
 
It won't be the end of fibre landlines.

All that 5g speed will be shared between all the users on that cell.
Even if the base station was infinitely fast, it would be limited by the speed of its backbone connection (fibre connection to it) divided by number of active users.

You can see this in action in 4g areas with high population & nimby culture that limits number of masts. Even though you have 4g, data rate is rubbish as it's shared between too many & it would probably be faster to drop back to 3g data.

So your great 5g speeds now will get diluted in a couple of years when everyone has a 5g phone.
Thats a bit contentious
 
Haven't got a 5G capable phone, but down at the street corner a dirty great brown(!) mast with 4 green cabinets. I was though surprised there wasn't a campaign against it (remember that woman saying to a BT engineer: if you flick that switch you kill people - maybe she's got 5G now ....).
 
All that 5g speed will be shared between all the users on that cell.
Even if the base station was infinitely fast, it would be limited by the speed of its backbone connection (fibre connection to it) divided by number of active users.

Looks like its not all that fast for some -

5G Technically

So, why are some 5G connections so slow? The first, and most impactful, reason is that the far-reaching 5G signals that have powered the vast majority of carrier rollouts in the US – especially from AT&T and, to a lesser extent, T-Mobile – have used low-band carrier frequencies. These frequencies (850MHz for AT&T and 600MHz for T-Mobile's early efforts) can reach miles from their towers. The downside is that their speed capacities are generally below 100Mbps in real-world conditions, right in line with what could already be accomplished with a solid 4G LTE connection.
Another important factor is widespread use of a technology called Dynamic Signal Sharing (DSS). This protocol allows carriers, including AT&T and Verizon, to use the same spectrum bands for both 4G LTE coverage and 5G coverage. The benefit is that some existing equipment and spectrum bands can expedite 5G rollouts by eliminating the need for new construction and spectrum license acquisitions.
Unfortunately, while the 5G side of DSS is legitimate 5G, of a sort, its actual performance is, in Verizon's own words, "comparable to [its] award-winning 4G LTE." This is due to a combination of factors, including congestion, the limitations of older hardware, and the same reliance on low-band frequencies.
Simply put, the most widespread types of 5G currently available in the US all fall under the category of 5G services that are no faster than 4G, and offer relatively little in the way of comparative benefits aside from being widely available.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-is-my-5g-so-slow-comparing-the-hype-to-the-reality/
 
So your great 5g speeds now will get diluted in a couple of years when everyone has a 5g phone.

Have you any idea why my (Barrows) 5G is not showing on the map but is on my phone?


1703013544468.png
 
5G as reported by your phone probably isn't 5G! It's actually 4G+ AKA 5G NSA (non-stand alone) and is reliant on 4G as the base carrier element and uses carrier aggregation to increase bandwidth which ususally has band n78 + a load of 4G carriers.

Essentially what happens is your phone connects to 4G on 1 or 2 carriers (same network, different frequencies) then if there's a demand (speedtest etc) the network will then allocate more carrriers to inncrease the bandwidth.
This is all good until the network gets saturated in that location and the radio resource controller throttles everyone's speeds. PSA, the RRC doesn't do a good very good job!

Voda are the only network un the UK that havestarted to roll out a true 5G SA (stand alone) network but I believe it's only in trial and invite only.
 
@ruskythegreat thanks for explaining, to be honest I have no need for such high speeds when out and about but it's good to know 4G can give us much faster speeds in the future as I don't think we will get 5G for a very long time here.
 
My new phone has 5G but I wasn't aware we had 5G round here, sat in ASDA car park I noticed the icon switch from 4G to 5G so I ran speed test and got 138 Mbps, I can see a lot of people getting rid of their landlines when 5G coverage becomes as common as 4G.

Can you connect to 5G, what speeds do you get?

Whilst there is now nothing plugged into my landline and it's not in service I did recently have fibre installed. My ISP offers speeds up to 900Mbps though in theory fibre can carry a lot more data than that.

I can't remember if we have 5G coverage at home but the signal inside the house is poor at best, on the top floor it's much better so I guess I I wanted to use a 5G modem for internet at home I could stick in the loft or something. Still can't see it ever being as good as a wired / fibred connection though so I think "landlines" are here to stay.
 
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