Ask HN: Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?
I feel like signal is lower in general, and I run into a lot more cases where connections seem to hang entirely. In theory 5G should offer a lot more bandwidth, but I don't remember ever being bandwidth-limited on LTE. 20Mbps is plenty on my phone. Same for latency. I'm not playing FPS games on my phone.
5G seems worse, but I used to work on a physical layer wireless technology and it might be placebo knowing that the higher frequencies used for 5G don't go as far or penetrate as effectively.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadMy 5G connection is trash, but I just switched up Google Fi, which is using T-Mobile's network.
Inside my apartment pictures on websites are loading like it's the early 2000's again.
I'm in a major city, I thought that would help.
The IMS core that powers calling and texting on most cellular networks has not been upgraded to route calls and texts over 5G Standalone yet (or if so, it doesn't seem to work with the Pixel 6 or 7 on T-Mobile or AT&T), meaning most phones stay on 5G Non-Standalone which is a substandard experience.
This is not true. T-Mobile has been allowing voNR calls on their network for over 2 years now on SA. It's up to to the handset to have it configured in modem firmware (it is configurable on Qualcomm chipsets through EFS). AT&T appears to be allowing voNR calls since around August of last year.
As for the 5G NSA substandard experience, most phones on the market don't support SA carrier aggregation. Without that the experience sucks, This is a hardware feature you'd need a flagship phone built within past 2 years to support (new ones do 3CA, older ones do 2CA). Better to leave on NSA for these phones or stay on LTE until more spectrum refarmed to NR.
Visible is a deprioritized version of Verizon's cellular network, so when your on a busy tower you will see slower speeds than postpaid Verizon Wireless customers. Verizon also happens to have the slowest network over the last few years since they have the most customers using it (nearly 130 million users) and smaller spectrum holdings than the other two major cellular networks.
Verizon also chose to deploy 5G service using spectrum sharing, so 4G and 5G speeds are very similar: https://www.zdnet.com/article/verizon-5g-dss-isnt-the-5g-you...
T-Mobile is using dedicated (and much larger sized) low and midband spectrum for their 5G connectivity, plus they have almost half as many customers, resulting in much faster speeds.
That being said 5G is still in its infancy, 5G Standalone is really needed to lower your phone's power use (so its not connecting to LTE and 5G at the same time), reduce latency and jitter, and allow 5G to stretch further for a more stable connection.
I'm on a Pixel 7. Honestly I'd like to try disabling 5G but haven't been able to find a way yet.
I made custom APN which removes 5g and it's just ignored =(
My first question is whether you're on one of the new plans or one of the old plans. This is actually important because the old plans are provisioned differently. The old plans use Visible's cloud APN while the new plans run off Verizon's. A lot of people have complained that Visible's was pretty terrible. The old plans were $25/mo if you had Party Pay. The new plans start at $30, but don't require any hoops.
After that, I'd note that if you're not on the Visible+ plan, you are going to be on a lower QCI (Quality of Service Class Identifier) than most of the traffic on the network. So if others are using the network, you might experience slowness, lags, and hangs. Verizon's network isn't in the best capacity position in a lot of areas so this can be meaningful.
Verizon's low-band 5G is also not great since it uses dynamic spectrum sharing rather than having dedicated 5G spectrum.
If you're on one of the old Visible plans, I'd pay the extra $5 and get on one of the new plans. You'll need a new SIM card for it, but it's probably worth it to get off the cloud core that has generated a lot of complaints. If you're on the new $30 plan, it might be worth trying the $45 plan for a month and seeing if you get better results with the 50GB of premium data. After that, you should probably try T-Mobile or AT&T.
You can try AT&T for free using their 14-day free trial on Cricket (https://www.cricketwireless.com/free-trial.html, note that it's only 3GB of data) and you can test out T-Mobile for a whole 3 months if you have an eSIM device (https://www.t-mobile.com/offers/free-trial). If you can, it's definitely worth trying an alternative carrier since they're now offering free trials (Verizon also offers one for 30 days: https://www.verizon.com/support/verizon-test-drive-faqs/).
EDIT: as an aside, it's probably not that "higher frequencies used for 5G don't go as far or penetrate as effectively" simply because, unless you're on Visible+, you don't have access to any of those higher frequencies. Legacy Visible plans and the current $30 Visible plan only have access to low-band 5G using the same frequencies as LTE.
Maybe the tech needs time to mature? Did the switch happen too early?
Don’t use fast.com on cellular as it’ll often get throttled.
20Mbps is not enough for a phone I use for tethering. 5G home internet is a thing here now too (Australia), and in a lot of cases beats the alternative.
In places I’m looking to live, your choices are 5G, “Fixed Wireless NBN” which tops out at around 60-80Mbps and Starlink. I know starlink takes a lot of power.
Its impressive that you can get a gigabit, WiFi 6 capable router with a new Qualcomm 5G/LTE chipset to fit in such a small power envelope!
Occasionally I'm at the airport (or someplace with the "real" wideband 5G) and I want to download a movie quickly. At that point I turn on 5G and get 2 Gbit down, which is convenient!
It consumes more battery so when I need to save I go back to 4G and I notice the slog.
Maybe your phone doesnt have a fast chip, your city isn't dense enough to have budget for antennas, or the providers doesnt want to give you 100Mbps... I was telling a friend recently how much of a miracle the internet speed on phones were these days, to tell you how 5G is positive here. It's not even that expensive.
In case it's relative and you expected much more, here is a speedtest from my phone, middle of Central HK, 40th floor inside my toilets, where I often browse HN from: https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/9021015738
map: preloaded maps were a thing before. So, no.
uber: preloaded maps. No, again.
This applies on all interfaces, including WLAN, with the affordance of being able to switch back without dropping flows.
I wouldn't recommend it for WLAN from a total system capacity perspective, as throttling eats up air-time.
This combined US/EU boyccott of questionable but cheap suppliers like Huawei makes the cost of 5G not worth it.
We all know high bandwidth and low latency are only required on very specific needs.
We don't play e-sports and play 8k videos on phones.
T-mobile has better coverage here compared to ATT and Verizon because of Mid-band spectrum they got with sprint merger. I think other 2 are in process deploying more mid band spectrum and may be that will improve it in future.
In Seattle I see 5G UC (Marketing term for their MidBand Spectrum) for TMobile pretty much everywhere.
Comparing 5G vs 4G as Technology is completely different to 5G vs 4G in real world implementation. That is a bit like asking if Core i9 is faster than Core i7 without knowing the clock speed, core count, cache and power budget. Or for Software developers comparing Python vs Ruby without knowing the code and VM, JIT or not
Most 5G network around the world are deployed in higher frequency spectrum. Hence the receiving Bar ( signal quality ) will generally be lowered until they are deployed in sub 1Ghz Band. Refarming frequency from 4G ( or 2G and 3G ) to 5G takes time, MNOs using Ericsson could use Dynamic Spectrum Sharing ( 4G and 5G inside the same Spectrum ) for faster 5G Rollout. But it has its own set of problems.
Until more users switch to 5G capable smartphone, and MNOs work their way to switch to 5G and especially 5G NR SA ( Stand Alone 5G without relaying on 4G Network Back End ). The full potential and advantage of 5G won't be noticeable if not, as in your case even worst than 4G.
Before anyone ask why switch to 5G then if it isn't better now. Well it really is a Chicken and Egg problem. But one way or another MNOs would like ( force ) you to switch to 5G as 5G offers better Network cost efficiency and much higher capacity.
What's the difference in the backends? Is it just a question of bandwidth, or is there something more?
So, this means an amber alert for some kid who is with one of their parents 500+ miles away blasts through.
So people are forced to do complicated stuff like rip out the alert module through the terminal, or set up some sort of schedule where the phone is airplane mode or turned off at night, etc.
Too much hassle, 3G is easier.
And 3G does use less power. LTE is faster with lower latency but beyond that.. I don't have VoLTE either because the provider is being cheap with my cheap plan.. so why bother.
5G will have lots of battery consumption if the example of LTE is any indication, and no user-facing improvements that I am aware of. Real ones, not theoretical. Wireless data prices are very high here. Nobody is going to use 5G for an internet connection.
Check out the diagram in this article: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/5g-network-architecture/ Note how little space is given to the cell towers.
As far as consumers are concerned we are comparing Python 2 and Python 3
And with 5G we are dealing with so many frequency bands, users and so on that the strength of signal really tells little.
This applies to signal level as reported to the user as well as internal metrics, eg handover (is this other cell better, should I switch to it?).
Turns out Google pushed the 6 series out before the OS was "ready" and "forgot" to tell anyone