How 5G works: the pros and cons
5G internet.
We've been talking about it for a while and now it's finally starting to arrive. It's a revolutionary kind of internet that promises to change everything from your phone, to home internet, to more futuristic fields like self-driving cars and even remote surgery, but 5G's also been in the headlines lately for a lot of bad reasons with bizarre conspiracy theories and rumours. So, to help clear things up, we're gonna explain to you, what exactly 5G is, how we got here, what the technology behind it is, and any real concerns that might exist around the new technology.
So, what is 5G?
Well, 5G or fifth generation, is the next step in mobile internet technology. It's what all of the next wave of phones and tablets are gonna use for speeds that are even faster than the LTE networks that we already have. Now, a news editor and reviewer, Chris Welch, has actually been testing all these networks for awhile already, so he can actually tell you what it's like to use these speeds today. - Okay, so all the big US carriers are well underway with rolling out 5G, and by the end of this year,
you should be able to get it wherever you live in the US, but what 5G means on each carrier is different. Speeds are different, coverage is different, so for the last year I've been testing out all the networks, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint is now part of that, just to see how fast it is and what a difference it makes in your day to day life. So let me try and explain. Now Verizon's 5G is blazing fast; you can get download speeds of over one gigabyte per second. That's up to 10 times faster than most home WIFI connections. You can download a whole season of a TV show in just minutes, but
the problem is coverage. Verizon's 5G is very, very spotty. It's there on one street and gone the next,
and indoor coverage is pretty much non-existent. That's because Verizon bases its whole 5G plan, for now, on what's called high band millimetre wave technology. You've seen it in those commercials as ultra wideband 5G.
But the issue is, the signal can't travel very far, so in an city where it wants to roll out 5G, Verizon's gotta put up all these nodes all over the city, and that's not really practical to do nationwide, so later on this year, Verizon's also gonna turn on its low-band 5G network, but there the speeds aren't that much faster than what your LTE phone can do today.
So for now, Verizon's 5G network isn't really worth upgrading to a new phone for, unless you've got a
node like right outside your apartment or your house. T-Mobile has the most comprehensive 5G plan
of all the US carriers. It's also using millimetre wave on the high end, plus Sprint's mid band spectrum in the middle, and it's own low-band 5G at the base. Now Sprint's mid band spectrum is much faster than LTE is today. It's much faster than phones today, it's not quite as fast as millimeter wave, but it makes a big difference day to day. And last is AT&T which has a similar strategy to Verizon, in that you get the high-band millimeter wave and low-band sub six 5G, but they're missing that middle part of the cake, that midband spectrum, so you'll have really fast speeds in small parts of some cities and somewhat faster speeds than your phone today everywhere else.
Now none of this is to be confused with AT&T's fake 5G, which is called 5GE. You've probably seen it in your phone's status bar at times. That's just fast LTE. It's got nothing to do with real 5G that's rolling out right now. These are still the early days of 5G. We've seen less than a dozen phones hit the market that offer these new faster speeds and some of the early ones were very buggy and would overheat in the summer.
Now those concerns, along with battery life, have largely been overcome with Qualcomm's latest chips. We've seen those chips in the Galaxy S20, the LG V60, and the OnePlus 8, all really great phones, but we're still waiting for that first iPhone from Apple that has 5G and that's rumoured to come later on this fall in 2020.
The transition from 2G to 3G, or from 3G to LTE, saw similar problems and the tech industry was able to solve them.
The only difference is that we're a lot more reliant on our phones than we were 10 to 15 years ago, and that's why these issues seem so much more important now. But the key thing to remember is that 5G and the technologies around it, aren't really new.
It's just our perspective on them, and our reliance on our phones that's really changed. Thanks so much for reading.
We've been really working on a 5G explainer for a while, so we're really glad to have put this together. If you have any other questions about 5G or technology in general, let us know.
We've been talking about it for a while and now it's finally starting to arrive. It's a revolutionary kind of internet that promises to change everything from your phone, to home internet, to more futuristic fields like self-driving cars and even remote surgery, but 5G's also been in the headlines lately for a lot of bad reasons with bizarre conspiracy theories and rumours. So, to help clear things up, we're gonna explain to you, what exactly 5G is, how we got here, what the technology behind it is, and any real concerns that might exist around the new technology.
So, what is 5G?
Well, 5G or fifth generation, is the next step in mobile internet technology. It's what all of the next wave of phones and tablets are gonna use for speeds that are even faster than the LTE networks that we already have. Now, a news editor and reviewer, Chris Welch, has actually been testing all these networks for awhile already, so he can actually tell you what it's like to use these speeds today. - Okay, so all the big US carriers are well underway with rolling out 5G, and by the end of this year,
you should be able to get it wherever you live in the US, but what 5G means on each carrier is different. Speeds are different, coverage is different, so for the last year I've been testing out all the networks, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint is now part of that, just to see how fast it is and what a difference it makes in your day to day life. So let me try and explain. Now Verizon's 5G is blazing fast; you can get download speeds of over one gigabyte per second. That's up to 10 times faster than most home WIFI connections. You can download a whole season of a TV show in just minutes, but
the problem is coverage. Verizon's 5G is very, very spotty. It's there on one street and gone the next,
and indoor coverage is pretty much non-existent. That's because Verizon bases its whole 5G plan, for now, on what's called high band millimetre wave technology. You've seen it in those commercials as ultra wideband 5G.
But the issue is, the signal can't travel very far, so in an city where it wants to roll out 5G, Verizon's gotta put up all these nodes all over the city, and that's not really practical to do nationwide, so later on this year, Verizon's also gonna turn on its low-band 5G network, but there the speeds aren't that much faster than what your LTE phone can do today.
So for now, Verizon's 5G network isn't really worth upgrading to a new phone for, unless you've got a
node like right outside your apartment or your house. T-Mobile has the most comprehensive 5G plan
of all the US carriers. It's also using millimetre wave on the high end, plus Sprint's mid band spectrum in the middle, and it's own low-band 5G at the base. Now Sprint's mid band spectrum is much faster than LTE is today. It's much faster than phones today, it's not quite as fast as millimeter wave, but it makes a big difference day to day. And last is AT&T which has a similar strategy to Verizon, in that you get the high-band millimeter wave and low-band sub six 5G, but they're missing that middle part of the cake, that midband spectrum, so you'll have really fast speeds in small parts of some cities and somewhat faster speeds than your phone today everywhere else.
Now none of this is to be confused with AT&T's fake 5G, which is called 5GE. You've probably seen it in your phone's status bar at times. That's just fast LTE. It's got nothing to do with real 5G that's rolling out right now. These are still the early days of 5G. We've seen less than a dozen phones hit the market that offer these new faster speeds and some of the early ones were very buggy and would overheat in the summer.
Now those concerns, along with battery life, have largely been overcome with Qualcomm's latest chips. We've seen those chips in the Galaxy S20, the LG V60, and the OnePlus 8, all really great phones, but we're still waiting for that first iPhone from Apple that has 5G and that's rumoured to come later on this fall in 2020.
The transition from 2G to 3G, or from 3G to LTE, saw similar problems and the tech industry was able to solve them.
The only difference is that we're a lot more reliant on our phones than we were 10 to 15 years ago, and that's why these issues seem so much more important now. But the key thing to remember is that 5G and the technologies around it, aren't really new.
It's just our perspective on them, and our reliance on our phones that's really changed. Thanks so much for reading.
We've been really working on a 5G explainer for a while, so we're really glad to have put this together. If you have any other questions about 5G or technology in general, let us know.
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