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.
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.
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.
It’s probably just our terrible network in the area (also not US).
That because they just released improved 4G and called it 5G for marketing reasons. Then everyone else did it too.
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.
I still don’t have 5G service because the cellular companies in Canada seem to think it is worth an extra $15/mo when even LTE is faster than I need on my phone.
LOL, I pay 20 $ equivalent in India for a year with 500gb + cellular data on 4G and unlimited calls and SMS .
Internet prices are fucked up in west.
India is 1.4 billion people. Canada has 33 millions spreaded in a much most vast area than India.
Russia has very low population density, too, yet I pay 10$/mo for unmetered 4G Internet and calls, and that’s after dramatic price spikes that raised prices from 6$/mo a year and a half prior.
You know that statistic is bullshit just looking at profit reports from Canada’s telcos right?
What carrier do you use? Visible doesn’t charge extra for 5G, and it’s probably cheaper than your current plan.
You missed that I’m in Canada. The Canadian cellphone space is bullshit owned by 3 main companies and one other that has inconsistent coverage. I’m with Virgin Mobile at the moment which is a cheaper flanker brand of Bell. The only ones that have offered a $34/mo plan with 5G is a company called Public Mobile (owned by Telus) that doesn’t support any international roaming (which is a nonstarter given how many websites insist on horrible SMS 2FA), and Freedom Mobile which has limited coverage even in major cities.
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.
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.
And why Comcast started calling their cable internet “10G”, the names mean nothing.
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
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.
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
Ahhh shit.
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.
$25 a month for truly unlimited? Unheard of and super cool
Yep. I use it for my phone and home internet.
Saved me at least $700 thus far in internet bills alone.
But they still get to charge customers for the potential service they’re not getting, right?
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!
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.
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…
