
AT&T’s current 5G is slower than 4G in nearly every city tested by PCMag - LinuxBender
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/atts-current-5g-is-slower-than-4g-in-nearly-every-city-tested-by-pcmag/
======
kayson
I really believe that for commercial cellular in urban areas, 5G is more of a
benefit for the carriers than the consumers. While low band spectrum (850MHz)
has decent penetrating power, the majority of 5G is deployed at ~5GHz and mm-
Wave frequencies, where you won't get much of any signal through a wall, or
even on the other side of the building. This is why so many 5G base stations
have to be deployed; the coverage just isn't as good. But the improvements in
base station handoffs and spectral efficiency will increase a carrier's total
capacity, even if the end user doesn't see a massive benefit.

There are scenarios where you might see massive speeds, though. 5G heavily
leverages Carrier Aggregation, where a client can connect to multiple channels
at once, increasing bandwidth, and beam-forming, where the "shape" of the
signal is modified to steer maximum power to the physical location of a
client. If you happen to be near a base station with good Signal to Noise
Ratio while downloading something large, the base station can allocate
multiple channels and use beamforming to finish your download at Gbps speeds
and get you off the network faster, freeing up spectrum time for more users at
lower SNR's and bandwidths.

There is potential for much more impactful deployment of 5G cellular in rural
areas where there aren't many buildings or walls blocking high frequency
signal. The same goes for point-to-point links such as inter-building WAN or
low latency self driving car to self driving car communication.

~~~
sandworm101
>> use beamforming to finish your download at Gbps speeds and get you off the
network faster

Ya, "Faster speeds mean people will spend less time clogging the connection"
... it never happens that way. Increased speeds mean people use more internet,
not less. Consumers start doing new things with the faster speeds (streaming
video etc) increasing demand and overall usage. The only real answer is
massive and _constantly increasing_ speeds and bandwidth capacities. It is a
race that cannot be won but must be run nevertheless.

~~~
bleepblorp
How much cellular data people use is dictated far more by data caps and
usurious overage charges than by the speed of their connection. With overage
charges of >$100 a GB in some parts of the world, usage per person isn't going
to increase just because speeds go up.

Unless the carriers have a sudden outbreak of generosity, data caps won't rise
under 5G, so usage per person will stay the same but improved efficiency will
allow the carriers to extract more profits from more people per cell
simultaneously.

5G doesn't solve any problems for end-users. It solves the carriers' problem
of 'how can we get more people to use up their data cap faster.'

~~~
rayiner
> Unless the carriers have a sudden outbreak of generosity, data caps won't
> rise under 5G,

Verizon's $80/month plan (for individuals) right now has unlimited 5G, plus
50GB of 4G LTE before you hit the soft cap. When 4G LTE was first introduced,
the price was $80 for 10GB of 4G LTE. That's a factor of 5 improvement in less
than a decade. Likewise, I can get 150 mbps+ on XLTE out here in the 'burbs
(where Verizon's network really shines). Back in 2011, 5-10 mbps would have
been great speeds.

What else in the computer industry has improved by that much over the last
decade? Maybe multi-core performance of Apple's phone CPUs? (7x jump from 2013
to today.) Certainly nothing in the desktop or laptop realm. A 2019 iMac with
9th generation core CPU is only about twice as fast (multicore) than a 2011
iMac with 3rd generation core CPU.

EDIT: The $45/month is lines on a family plan. Corrected to compare $80/month
for an individual plan.

~~~
dragontamer
> What else in the computer industry has improved by a factor of 10 over the
> last decade?

SSDs were still SATA in 2010 and capped at 500GB/s (and in practice were
slower than that). High-end SSDs today are maxing out PCIe 4.0 x4 for 6000+
GB/s.

GPUs probably have a 10x increase in speed. AMD 5870 and GTX 200 series...
yeah... that's way old.

Hard drive capacity is probably 10x bigger, maybe.

CPUs and RAM haven't improved much. Most things seem to be getting faster
though.

~~~
fomine3
nit: MB/s

------
thelazydogsback
I'm constantly amazed at how fast my 4G/LTE service is. I had to run my house
off of my tethered phone the other day, and browsing seemed faster than cable
-- obviously slower overall bandwidth, but good enough and very low latency.

I have no desire for my phone to be faster in either processing power or
bandwidth -- it would give me absolutely no benefit.

I wish 5G, 8K video (and even 4k in many cases), etc., were not thrust upon
consumers. Things are already good enough to be close to magic.

~~~
Foivos
In 2011-2012, when 4G started becoming mainstream, did you make similar
claims? For example, did you say something in the lines of “why would I want
to watch videos on my phone? 3G is more than enough for the browsing I am
doing now?”

4G might be good enough for you right now, but your needs will increase, way
more and way faster than you expect. Remember this the next time you try to do
a video call / watch an HD video / etc. If we had stayed in 3G, you would not
be able to do any of these, but when 4G was introduced you did not feel any
need for them.

~~~
Rury
Idk, I still don't know why anyone would want to watch videos on their phone,
and I have a 4G phone capable of showing videos... (watching videos on other
devices is _way better_ ).

I mean, since the invention of semi trucks, you could technically can send me
~40 tons of postcards to me all in one shipment, which would be impossible in
the days where postcards were sent via a guy with a satchel on horseback, but
then why aren't you sending me 40 tons of postcards right now? Why would you
even want to?

Don't get me wrong, semi trucks certainly have it's uses and has enabled many
things, so would 5G provided it does something better than 4G, but I can see
why some people would go "Why would you want more of that?" Not everyone has
the same wants and needs.

These days, latency seems more problematic to me than bandwidth. Unfortunately
though, short of optimizing networks, and reducing the distance between server
and client, there's not much that can be done for latency...

~~~
sobani
> Not everyone has the same wants and needs.

And that's why 4G is useful for a lot of people even if it's not useful for
you specifically.

5G will be similar. _You_ might not benefit, but a lot of other people will.

------
Scoundreller
Is 5G like 4G where it’s more spectrally efficient? So even if 5G is slower
because it’s allocated fewer MHz, in aggregate, the network’s bandwidth is
increased?

While 20mbps vs 100mbps is nice to have the luxury of comparing on mobile, my
bigger question is how many gb you can consume as a user before getting
throttled.

Canada has speedy mobile networks... and $5-$10/gb pricing. No wonder why it’s
fast.

~~~
albertopv
In Italy I pay 5€/month for 4G 40GB/month (WindTre operator). I tested this
morning in Treviso, near Venice, (I was working remotely), download speed was
about 40Mbit/sec. Vodafone is much faster but a bit more expensive.

~~~
sirbutters
In France I signed up for an exclusive offer with Free Mobile operator where
100GB/month (in France) for 1 year only cost 1 EUR per month, and then would
go back to 19.99 EUR per month. After 11 months, the company shat itself they
would lose a ton of customers, so decided to give a 10 EUR a month discount...
indefinitely. The kicker is that their roaming deal in the US is amazing: 25GB
per month at HSPA+ speed. So now I pretty much have a $11/month bill for my
data plan in the US. I use Google Voice for people to contact me. Best deal
ever.

~~~
xxpor
HSPA+ will be turned off in the US in early 2022, FWIW. Unless you just meant
HSPA+ speeds, not an actual HSPA+ connection.

~~~
sirbutters
Just HSPA+ speed (I think). In any case they wouldn't just remove the service,
they'd transfer to another protocol. For the life of me I can't understand why
anyone would need more speed. It's not like I need to download a 3GB game in X
seconds in a spot where I don't have a wifi. This whole LTE and 5G is
marketing bullshit. No one needs that much speed. IMHO.

------
gok
Good news got buried from the original story:

"All three US carriers showed significantly higher download speeds and better
broadband reliability than they did in our 2019 tests."

------
criddell
Here's a link to the original PC Mag story:

[https://www.pcmag.com/fastest-mobile-
networks/2020](https://www.pcmag.com/fastest-mobile-networks/2020)

------
throwaway287391
I had an amazing experience with 5G home broadband in the UK...while it
lasted. I paid £29/month and always got the promised 300+mbps (sometimes up to
500-600) down with ~10ms ping. It was 100% rock solid and seemed to be truly
unlimited, e.g. in the first month I downloaded >500GB and never noticed any
throttling whatsoever.

Then they took down the tower nearest to my flat for "improvements" a couple
months into the pandemic and from then on it basically didn't work at all (it
was supposed to switch to 4G and it theoretically did but the best I got with
that was an extremely flaky 10mbps). They originally said it'd be fixed in a
week but it was completely unusable for at least a month. So now I'm back to a
cable connection.

I still miss the 5G though -- there was something pretty amazing about just
plugging it into the mains and suddenly having super-fast wifi with 0
installation. I personally remain optimistic about its future, unlike pretty
much everyone else in this thread I guess.

------
axaxs
I remember this being the case on the dawn of each new cellular technology.
Edge vs 3g, HSPA(+) vs 4g, etc. It'll get better over time. That said, I am
purposely avoiding 5g until that time. No sense in paying extra for the phone
and service for features I -don't- want to use.

~~~
rsynnott
5G is generally looking a good bit better than 4G in most markets (including
in non-AT&T US markets). This would seem to be an AT&T problem.

That said, I wouldn't go near a 5G phone right now; in a year or so the price
and battery impact will be down a lot.

~~~
axaxs
Yeah, power usage is going to be a hard one. One of the biggest things to
drain battery, moreso than screen time even, is a super weak cell signal. I am
curious how they are going to mitigate this effect, especially with mid band
and mmwave 5g. I don't want my phone grabbing onto weak 5g and burning up when
I'd be perfectly happy with existing low band LTE.

------
ineedasername
I'm looking for someone to explain why 5G is important for the average user.
In my case, I can stream video with no problem, web pages load quickly, new
apps download fast.

The primary use case I can think of is to replace traditional cable broadband
with it, but that would be impractically expensive given the cost of mobile
data.

~~~
Foivos
Early versions of 5G, known as “non standalone”, are just glorified 4G. With
the exception of the radio link, everything else is 4G. This means that the
value proposition is that more people per base station (or per surface area)
will be able to stream video, download fast etc.

When stand alone 5G becomes available, the latency of the network will become
comparable to the latency of wired networks, especially if it is combined with
mobile edge computing. Then, you will have access to new services that are
impossible now, such as game steaming and VR.

I agree though that 5G is way more important for the public sector and the
industry than the average consumer.

~~~
eru
Why the public sector?

~~~
Foivos
From the IoT side, it will be possible to have sensors everywhere in the city.
So, you can have services like smart parking, monitoring of pollution at the
city block level, etc.

With the introduction of slicing, it will be possible to have specific SIM
cards as “first class citizens”, with complete priority over everything in the
network, while also being secure. These SIMs can become “first class citizens”
dynamically. So for example devices that belong to firefighters can become so,
during an emergency. This enables ordinary devices to meet the high SLAs
needed in such cases. Thus, now firefighters can use the already existing, way
more powerful (for example it can do live video) and cheap public network,
instead of their current communications solutions.

~~~
eru
Oh, you meant IoT for infrastructure etc. Yes, that makes a lot of sense.
Thanks for explaining!

Your example with the firefighters is a good one, no matter whether they are
public sector employees like in the US or privatised like in Denmark. That's
why I was confused.

------
leptoniscool
The article says they only gave 5G 5MHz of spectrum. Of course this makes it
slower.. In 4G LTE it's common to use multiple blocks of spectrum (carrier
aggregation) to provide even higher data throughput.

~~~
mdasen
Yea, 5G does support carrier aggregation with LTE. It looks like the big
difference is in LAA (License Assisted Access). LAA allows the use of
unlicensed spectrum which can be added to the licensed spectrum that carriers
use. 5G NR Release 15 (which is what networks are almost assuredly running
since Release 16 just came out in July) doesn't have the ability to use
unlicensed spectrum. One of the images in the PCMag article (linked below)
shows the different combinations. You can see how LTE with LAA just has a lot
of spectrum dedicated to it. 5G ends up with almost the same amount of
spectrum as LTE for non-LAA LTE.

And it's important to note that right now, 5G isn't that much more efficient
than LTE. Remember, when LTE came out, it was advertised as 5-8Mbps which we'd
consider slow today. 5G NR will get better as it evolves. However, right now
it looks like it'll be around 20% more efficient in low-band deployments and
50% more efficient in mid-band deployments (T-Mobile had numbers similar to
that in some FCC filings during their merger proceedings, IIRC). Things like
higher-order MIMO will help mid-band and higher applications more.

Given the chart of relative 5G/4G download speeds and the fact that T-Mobile
usually beats their 4G network, it seems likely that AT&T is leaning heavily
on LAA for their LTE performance and that's the difference-maker. As
Release-16 becomes what networks and phones are using, that will likely
change.

[https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/fastest-
networks/03efBScpy2I3SSV...](https://i.pcmag.com/imagery/fastest-
networks/03efBScpy2I3SSVCIHR6erM-7.fit_lim.size_1600x99999.jpg)

[https://www.pcmag.com/fastest-mobile-
networks/2020](https://www.pcmag.com/fastest-mobile-networks/2020)

~~~
fulafel
wasn't 4G supposed to be 1 Gbps originally? Eg first para at
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#Technical_overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G#Technical_overview)

------
fwiwm2c
Given how these companies think, AT&T's solution to solve this might be to
slow down 4G vs. improving 5G speeds :-)

~~~
deelawn
Ha. Exactly what I was thinking

------
mensetmanusman
High frequency is hard, because fewer materials are transparent, so you have
to deal with impedance matching and reflections.

------
Apofis
I'm amazed that Verizon is getting 2000mbps/10ms with 5G in certain places. I
assume that's why they and Google pretty much ceased fiber roll-out.

~~~
mdasen
Verizon often has 1,000MHz+ of millimeter-wave spectrum and there's virtually
no one using it. T-Mobile is getting 300Mbps speeds using only 40-60MHz of
spectrum. Even LTE, when no one is using it, can easily hit a few hundred Mbps
(and sometimes more) with traditional spectrum. As carriers are able to use
double or triple the spectrum for 5G, we're going to get faster speeds.

I think you're right that some halt of the fiber rollout is likely due to the
impact that 5G will have. Even if mmWave spectrum can't go very far, it
probably offers a good last-few-hundred-feet option. Instead of having to run
fiber into someone's home, they can run fiber to their street and let a
wireless link handle the last bit. They don't have to deal with construction
permits, digging, coordinating with homeowners, etc.

However, I don't know what the costs of 5G equipment are right now and there
might be resistance from neighborhoods that don't want a 5G cell-site on top
of a bunch of lamp-posts in their area. I don't find them that intrusive, but
many people have strong aesthetic opinions on their neighborhoods. It'll be
interesting to see how things turn out.

~~~
wintermutestwin
>there might be resistance from neighborhoods that don't want a 5G cell-site
on top of a bunch of lamp-posts in their area.

IME, most of the resistance is from people who think that 5G is going to give
them cancer. Pseudo-scientific anti-5G posts abound on local facebook groups.

------
silverlyra
am I reading this right?

High-bandwidth wireless data, even using the latest 5G technology, still
literally requires ample bandwidth: wide enough radio frequency channel(s)
over which to communicate. So far, two major US cellular providers (AT&T and
T-Mobile) have allocated so little spectrum space to 5G, that 4G connections
are still faster in almost every city tested. For example, on AT&T’s 4G
network, phones can use up to seven radio bands simultaneously to increase
speeds, but phones on 5G are still limited to a single 5MHz band.

Sounds like this is what empirical testing of AT&T and T-Mobile networks would
have expected to find. Verizon’s 5G network isn’t showing this issue because
they’re using only millimeter-wave spectrum and equipment, with the trade-off
being scant availability because of its tiny usable cell area.

~~~
bluGill
I just drive through Iowa and had 5g almost all the way. A year ago I drove
the same route and it was 2g the whole way. So t-mobile has clearly sped
things up in rural areas for me. At home I still get 4g, but that is good
enough

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gzu
Give me rock solid and cheaper 4G before jumping the gun to 5G.

How will going from say 40mbps to 250mbps+ on a phone help me in any way over
the next 2 years? For video, the limits of a phone display cap the max bitrate
below 5G's speed. 1080p at 60fps is around 16mbps.

~~~
chrisco255
Simple, they will be competing directly with cable for home internet once 5G
is deployed.

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c1yd3i
I bet we can all agree that any development of our nation's cellular network
is a good thing :)

------
jtdev
I hope Apple buys AT&T...

------
supernova87a
Until I see the pricing of 5G, I don't believe a word of it being better or
more useful to me.

All I expect is that I'll burn through my monthly data sooner, and not see a
dime of faster, cheaper technology improvement.

Why should I be in favor of 5G?

------
mrfusion
Is it worth waiting to buy a new phone until they support 5g?

~~~
Foivos
It depends on how often you change phones. If you change phone, keep your
phones more than 3 years I would wait. If not, by the time you will really
need to have 5G you would be about to buy the next phone, which will certainly
have 5G.

------
Wagmire
i guess they couldnt get enough government money with all that they already
sell

------
grishka
So what's the point of 5G again?

~~~
jbverschoor
Latency

~~~
gsich
The rest of the internet doesn't care about that. Latency improvements are
from your device to the cell tower only. So probably 5ms improvement.

~~~
jbverschoor
Actually, people kind of care with conference calls

~~~
gsich
Main source of latency is not the last mile in regards to mobile networks. So
yes, the rest of the internet doesn't care, as those routes are not going to
change just because you now have 5G.

------
inetsee
A quick search leads me to believe that the majority of people use their
smartphones as phones; they make calls, they send text messages, they may use
apps to buy movie tickets, check their mail, play games. Most of these uses
don't really demand a lot of bandwidth. Why should I watch a video on my
smartphones 5" screen when I could watch on my 55" TV.

I think the cellular carriers should invest more in improving their coverage,
especially in rural areas. Of course, that'll never happen because the
carriers would rather focus their investments in the big cities, where people
are willing to buy a $1000 smartphone every year.

~~~
samatman
One of my 'smartphones' has a screen the same size as most of the laptops I've
ever owned, 13" rounded up.

Also, you're way out of touch with how 'the youth' (anyone under 30) use the
Internet. It's highly video-centric, and sure, depending on the market,
keeping that video feed alive away from WiFi can get expensive: but I would
rather pay than go without, and I suspect this is often true for most
youngsters as well.

Cell carriers spend money where they can make money, and that isn't rural
bandwidth. If we want to change that, and I think it's worthwhile to do so, it
will take legislation.

