
Real world 4G vs. 5G test shows 14x bandwidth increase - velmu
https://react-etc.net/entry/real-world-4g-lte-vs-5g-test-benchmark-14x-bandwidth
======
mdasen
Without more details on the test setup, it's hard to evaluate it.

5G can be deployed with much more spectrum than 4G can be. Deployed with
60-80MHz of spectrum, US carriers have shown off LTE north of 700Mbps. The
article said that they were using the 3.5GHz band, but they didn't say how
much spectrum they were using which makes the comparison incredibly suspect.
Do an image search for "T-Mobile gigabit" or "Sprint gigabit" and you'll see
plenty of tests in areas where the companies have a lot of spectrum in a small
area doing very high speed.

AT&T and Verizon are planning on launching 5G with hundreds of MHz of spectrum
in millimeter wave bands. That spectrum won't travel far and will have
difficulty going through walls, but will have lots of capacity given how much
they have.

By contrast, LTE deployments are usually in the range of 10-80MHz. Given the
low 50Mbps speed of their 4G test, it seems like they didn't use much spectrum
at all for 4G. If they had a reasonable LTE setup with 80MHz of spectrum in
4xCA, 256QAM, and 4x4 MIMO, they should easily beat 500Mbps and probably get
closer to 800Mbps. The low LTE speed makes me conclude that they're just
looking to promote Elisa (the wireless operator that worked with the newspaper
to do the test) and set it up to just make for a good article.

What I want is a comparison between LTE and 5G NR that uses the same amount of
spectrum in the same band. 5G NR is likely to have new applications with
millimeter wave and very high order MIMO, but that won't work at the lower
frequencies that are used to create broad coverage. In the 500-2,000MHz range
with the same amount of spectrum, how much faster is 5G NR?

Now, 5G NR is said to have some great benefits in terms of latency and power
use for low-bandwidth devices on top of bandwidth increases, but people aren't
showing off real comparisons yet.

Also, just to see how bad a test of LTE this was, average speeds at the super
bowl were over 50Mbps for three carriers: [http://bgr.com/2018/02/05/t-mobile-
vs-verizon-fastest-networ...](http://bgr.com/2018/02/05/t-mobile-vs-verizon-
fastest-network-super-bowl-2018/). I mean, T-Mobile was able to top 120Mbps in
a real-world situation. They couldn't beat 50Mbps on an unloaded LTE network?
That just sounds like they gave it very little spectrum. Heck, Ookla notes
that _average_ nationwide speeds are 31.58Mbps for T-Mobile, 23.83Mbps for
Sprint, 24.39Mbps for AT&T, and 28.21Mbps for Verizon. That's an average that
includes places with bad coverage and such. 50Mbps is a very low LTE
performance number in a lab which just makes it feel suspect.

Now, it could be that 5G NR, like UMTS in its early days, has a lot more room
for improvement. UMTS launched at 384kbps which wasn't extremely faster than
EDGE and 1xRTT, but did have big latency benefits. A little later, it was
pushed further and eventually got as high as 42Mbps (theoretical). Sometimes
they kinda exaggerate the early tests because the technology is really better
over the long run, but it will take some time to get there.

~~~
jfindley
I would really like details on latency. Bandwidth is all very well, but it's
high latency that is so often the real limiting factor in browsing
performance. I live in a rural area, and my wired connection is very slow (~
12Mbps). 4G competes well for bandwidth, but the latency (and the fact that
the latency is highly variable) makes 4G unsuitable for general purpose
internet use.

If 5G could be made closer to WiFi for both mean latency and latency stability
it would have a potentially huge impact on broadband access in remote regions
(assuming it's easier to deploy 5G there than fiber - which I think is true
for most regions).

~~~
PeterisP
Isn't the latency mainly determined by congestion / bandwidth saturation on
either the radio network or operator's backbone?

IIRC the actual technological latency of a 4G link is just ~2 ms extra; the
problem is that you have to share the link with many people, so if the network
is overloaded you may get unstable latency. In this regard, anything that
increases capacity would automatically help with latency as well.

~~~
ilovecars2
Yes, but also retransmission that happens at the physical/link layer to mask
lossy links from higher layer protocols, such as TCP.

------
the_mitsuhiko
T-Mobile austria did the same a few days ago. They achieved 3ms latency to a
drone which they were remote controlling and 2Gbit.

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/t-mo-
austria/sets/721576693479...](https://www.flickr.com/photos/t-mo-
austria/sets/72157669347988299/)

[https://newsroom.t-mobile.at/wp-
content/uploads/2018/02/1802...](https://newsroom.t-mobile.at/wp-
content/uploads/2018/02/180209_TMA_PA_5G-Showcase_englisch.pdf)

~~~
kawsper
It is indeed an impressive feat, especially compared with racing drone pilots
that usually fly with around 0.5 to 1 ms delay between our video transmitters
and receivers on the 5.8Ghz band (the cameras however adds a delay of 20-30
ms, but that is unrelated in this comparison).

------
fredley
I'm not disputing 5G is faster, but was congestion taken into account for this
test? 4G for me is noticeably slower than when I first got a 4G phone,
primarily because the network has become more congested as it became the
mainstream.

~~~
Someone1234
And related to that, how many towers currently have the bandwidth capacity at
their base to support this new throughput at scale? All this may do is shift
the bottleneck from between handset & tower, to the tower's own
infrastructure.

Mobile vendors won't mind because your phone will say "5G" in the status bar
and they can charge more. But in reality your phone to web-site performance
(particularly outside of artificial benchmarks) may not improve substantially.

~~~
martinald
Most sites have fibre backhaul now. And then point to point wireless can do
10gig+ these days anyway to a tower that does have fibre backhaul.

~~~
askvictor
Even with fibre, it wouldn't take many users on the theoretical capacity of 5g
to saturate the uplink.

~~~
Retric
5g is shared bandwidth from ~20Gbps download 10gbps upload, increasing the
number of users over a minimum does not increase peak bandwidth just
utilization.

Considering multiple carriors would each have 20gbps and there are ~200,000
cell towers in the US we are talking massive bandwidth in aggregate.

------
dx034
What standard is this now? Last time I tried to read up on 5G, it was
described as a collection of ideas for a new standard rather than one specific
technology. IS this still the case (i.e. different companies work on competing
technologies) or does 5G by now mean the same for all companies?

~~~
kevincennis
No, all these deployments are considered "pre-standard" 5G.

~~~
msh
No, the 5G NR standard was finalized in december of 2017.

~~~
avian
Do you have any link with more information on that?

~~~
msh
[https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/12/20/16803326/5g...](https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2017/12/20/16803326/5g-network-
specification-standard-3gpp-nr-official)

------
nfriedly
Faster speed is great, but what about bumping the data caps?

I was able to hit ~70mb/s over 4G several years ago (in ideal conditions).
That's enough to burn through most bandwidth caps in a couple of minutes!

Even most "unlimited" plans still throttle you after some point.

~~~
DenisM
T-Mobile has 50gb throttle limit that’s only enforced during congestion.

~~~
nfriedly
Well, that's an improvement. I liked T-Mobile when I lived where they had
coverage.

------
lolive
I wonder what kind of technologies are behind 3G, 4G and 5G.

From a consumer perspective, upgrading the number means "the same, simply
better and faster". (just like an iphone :)

The truth is probably more complex than that.

From my experience, 4G was much more reliable that 3G has ever been. May be
the service providers have improved. But I have the feeling that 4G is a
fundamentally different technology from 3G. In that case, is 5G fundamentally
different from 4G?

~~~
mdasen
3G technologies used CDMA while LTE uses OFDM so it is a different way of
encoding. However, wireless carriers in the US have often increased their
number of cell sites substantially - possibly doubling. The amount of spectrum
that carriers have has increased substantially - again, more than doubling in
some cases. Plus, with the rise of data, consumers now have a way of testing
the quality of their link (ie. a speed test) so it's easier to verify under-
performing phones. That probably has an impact on device manufacturers. LTE's
decreased latency can also make it seem more reliable. Slow ping times mean
that downloading a web page can become tedious and seem like it's not working
as a script blocks and you're waiting on a 400ms round-trip between the 3G
network and getting to the server. Even things like the rise of cheap CDNs
like CloudFlare mean that more content is located near you.

5G NR is still OFDM based.

~~~
zmb_
At least on the research side there has been work on GFDM (Generalized
Frequency Division Multiplexing) as a possible modulation technique for 5G. I
don't follow the standardization enough to know what are the chances of it
making it into a standard.

------
gok
Nice, soon 500 word articles like this one be able to have 30.2MB of
Javascript frameworks and ads instead of just 2.2MB and load in the same
amount of time!

------
mrinterweb
Soon, people will be able to max out their monthly data plan in less than 10
seconds. After the first glorious 10 seconds, their bandwidth will be
artificially reduced to 256Kbps.

------
gene-h
Frankly I'm wondering if 5G will ever take off. One problem with 5G is that it
uses higher frequencies, which carry more bandwidth, but don't go through
obstacles so well. So you need much more hotspots, which A is creating zoning
nightmares and B is an expensive proposition. Really performance is similar to
that of wifi. So the question is why not just use wifi? There's a bunch of
wifi hardware already installed, we can assume in the future that more will be
installed, and that wifi will continue to improve. Really the big problems
with building a wifi based cellular network are incentives, software, and
ISPs. We need a way to incentivize people to open up their routers so that
strangers can use them and software so that the people using these routers
aren't getting snooped on by the people who own the routers. Software and
incentives aren't that hard to fix and could be an interesting startup
opportunity. However, ISPs could quash any company that tries to do this.

[0][https://www.fastcompany.com/40468468/the-debate-over-
neighbo...](https://www.fastcompany.com/40468468/the-debate-over-neighborhood-
zoning-could-hold-up-fast-5g-wireless-for-years-to-come)

~~~
kalleboo
Because WiFi sucks.

If I'm riding a tram and leave WiFi on, the continuous connection and
disconnection of networks (I pay for a WiFi service with a bunch of hotspots)
makes my internet useless.

If it wasn't for iOS's restrictions on some types of data usage I would never
turn on WiFi on my phone.

> we can assume in the future [...] that wifi will continue to improve

WiFi has gotten faster over the years but none of the fundamental problems
have been solved. Heck, WiFi routers still hijack your DNS and HTTP
connections just to show a ToS or let you log in! Why is this not an adopted
part of the standard?

~~~
TomMarius
Wasn't RADIUS supposed to allow this?

~~~
kalleboo
There are lots of standards I'm sure, but one problem with WiFi is the
implementations are usually complete crap. With 3G/4G stuff, at least the
operators have some minimum QA standards that force the manufacturers to up
their game, but for WiFi anything goes.

------
negus
"4G vs. 5G" What a marketing BS! Let's say it straight: we increased radio
frequency by N multiplier to get larger badwidth with RF penetration
capabilities tradeoff -- now we should put radio transmitting stations at a
distance of 30 meters between each other and behind every corner, cause
radiowaves at this frequency cannot pass through even a plywood sheet.

------
MBCook
Has everyone settled on one 5G or will the 5G landscape in the US still be
split between GSM 5G and CDMA 5G?

~~~
kalleboo
Qualcomm figured out that they make more money by patenting everything they
can think of in 4G/5G and collecting that from everyone instead of selling
their own hardware to a handful of operators who adopt their closed standard,
so CDMA is dead (their "CDMA 4G" was never adopted by anyone, everything
worldwide is LTE/"GSM 4G")

~~~
MBCook
I didn’t know we’d already centralized. Thanks.

------
callesgg
Since 4G came out i have never had to think about the internet speed of my
phone. Only when it has been connected to wifi abroad.

What we need is not speed or bandwidth, it is penetration and range.

*It is probably a regional thing i can image that 4G could be quite slow in the midst of Tokyo.

~~~
martinald
TBH LTE800/LTE700 covers the range and penetration quite well. A rural
macrocell can cover 20-30km. 5G isn't going to solve the underlying physics
here.

There's also LTE450 which could do absolutely ridiculous distances (used in
Russia and Scandinavia I believe).

------
xutopia
I remember when I tried LTE for the first time and was blown away by huge
speeds. Thing is none of this matters when plenty of clients use the same
system and the provider decides to throttle all of them.

------
DenisM
Well, here’s your last-mile broadband competition!

I hope we will see the major four cell carriers plus Comcast bringing
broadband choices from one to three-five options for most of the country.

------
JohnJamesRambo
I've never really needed more than 4g and from what I read 5g has severe
problems with penetrating solid structures.

We have a tiny screen on our phone how much more bandwidth do we need? You
would probably have to hold the screen directly to your eyeball to need 4k
videos on your phone.

------
mtgx
5G is brand new tech that's not used by anyone. 4G was also supposed to be
50-70 Mbps when it launched. It was at most 12 Mbps, in the beginning, and
then it dropped to much less than that as more people got onto the 4G network.

------
kosei
Unless data plans increase alongside this, it just means most people will just
reach their caps dramatically quicker. At least for me, speed isn't currently
the big limiting factor; the data cap is.

------
E765
This is just going to end up like the race for the thinnest phone. Nobody
really cares past a certain point, but jeez, they'll keep trying.

~~~
nikanj
The operators care, because faster traffic means more customers per megahertz
of spectrum.

------
kylec
Obviously the more speed the better for PC and residential internet
connections, but for me and probably a lot of other people 4G is more than
fast enough for what we need on our phones.

In fact, I have the AT&T "Unlimited Choice" plan on my phone, which caps my
bandwidth at 3Mbps and it's been totally fine. I never find myself wishing I
had a faster cell phone connection.

------
rocky1138
Do you think this means streaming high end games like OnLive tried to do will
become a reality?

------
Animats
Of course. Nobody's on 5G yet.

------
eddd
I talked to a friend who is a part of R&D 5G team. He is completely terrified.
Pointing a high energy stream of photons to peoples phones, creates a risk of
signal interference resulting in burning people (yeah, lasers).

I don't know much about mobile tech, but when I heard that from a person who
sits in the lab doing it, my feelings about 5G are a little mixed.

