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Is 5G really good? (self.technology)

submitted 7 months ago by Darth_Vader__ to c/technology

27 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've heard multiple issues with 5G, like range and stuff, effectively sacrificing range and reliability for even more speed just so that companies can market it better. Do you think 5G is a downgrade compared to 4G?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Some of what you may have heard about the range and such might not be about 5G phone networks but 5G wifi. Any range differences aren't really even gonna be noticed compared to 4G most of the time.

5G(hz) wifi has more capacity and is faster, but has limited range and doesn't penetrate walls as well as 2.4GHz

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago

I think this must be what's happening. 5G cell is equal or better than 4G cell in almost all ways. And if your phone is set to dynamically switch between 4g and 5g depending on what's best at any given moment then there's literally no downside, only upsides

[–] [email protected] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

mmWave 5G can have much worse signal strength than 5G running in the 700-2400MHz spectrum. Its range is much shorter and it gets disturbed by air particles like rain. With that said, I don't know if one could get only mmWave reception or whether mmWave can be used only in addition to 700-2400MHz for speed augmentation. 🤔

[–] deranger 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

IME rain and humidity has little to no effect. I can get 900mbps in clear skies or in a torrential downpour as long as I’m not behind multiple walls. The single wall I have to contend with at work (not counting cube walls) barely affects reception. If I’m standing under the tower I can get 1gbps.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

That's probably not going through mmWave signal but the sub-mmWave spectrum we've previously used for 4G. I've hit >400Mbps on good ol' LTE back in 2018 on AWS.

The most widely used form of 5G, sub-6 GHz 5G (mid-band), is capable of delivering data rates ranging from 10 to 1,000 megabits per second (Mbps) [1]

According to this, 5G should be able to do 1Tb on sub-mmWave.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G?wprov=sfla1