Working overtime: 5G is makes progress in the US
FOSTER CITY, Calif. – Given all the time that most of us have spent at home recently, it’s easy to lose sight of advances in technologies such as 5G that are generally more useful when we’re out and about.
Just as municipalities around the country used reductions in traffic to speed up road improvement projects and other infrastructure enhancements, several of the U.S.-based telco carriers have been working to bring 5G to life sooner than anticipated.
Last week, AT&T announced it achieved nationwide coverage for its 5G network, joining T-Mobile, which reached that important goal last December. The companies use “lowband” frequencies to achieve nationwide networks. Cellular signals, which are transmitted at these lower frequencies (600 MHz for T-Mobile and 850 MHz for AT&T), are able to travel long distances. This means companies can create a bigger network with fewer cell towers.
The problem is that the width of the “lanes” used to transmit data at those frequencies are very narrow, which means that the speeds are not much different from 4G. That’s certainly not what we were led to believe 5G was going to be able to do.
You can get significantly faster 5G download speeds using a technology called millimeter wave (mmWave), which transmits data at much higher frequencies (such as 39 GHz) and, most importantly, offers significantly wider lanes for data traffic. The problem with mmWave is that the signals don’t travel far (roughly a city block), and they’re highly susceptible to interference, including from windows, walls and even other people.
If you can get mmWave 5G service (which all three major U.S. carriers enabled but only in a few cities), it can deliver download speeds that are 50 times faster than 4G. The huge caveat is that you have to be outside, not moving, with few people around and in the right section of the cities where the service is turned on.
In real-world tests of Verizon’s 5G network, which uses only mmWave, a measurement company called Open Signal found that people were getting 5G service only 0.4% of the time. If you’ve spent a lot of money on a 5G phone, that’s probably not going to make you very happy.
The most interesting near-term options for 5G are around the “mid-band” spectrum, radio frequencies in the roughly 2.5-3.5 GHz range. Thanks to its acquisition of Sprint, T-Mobile is the only U.S. carrier using these frequencies, although AT&T and Verizon have talked about using them.
The quality of 5G service when using mid-band frequencies turns out to be a solid compromise of good coverage (although not quite as wide as the lowband frequencies) with traffic lane sizes that should accommodate a respectable speed increase of 10 times over 4G.
In addition to basic frequency developments, the carriers have been working on other enhancements to their 5G networks. AT&T announced about a month ago that it turned on a technology called DSS (Dynamic Spectrum Sharing), which allows 4G and 5G phones to use the same frequencies. AT&T can use some of its huge range of 4G coverage to carry 5G signals, which can lead to better coverage and faster download speeds.
T-Mobile is moving aggressively toward deploying 5G SA (Standalone) Mode. All aspects of the network – the wireless connection to the cell tower and the internal “core” network that carries the data to and from various websites – are optimized for 5G. This will translate into another feature that’s been long-promised for 5G – reductions in latency, or lag time. Up until now, all 5G networks have been in NSA (NonStandalone) Mode, which mixes 5G radio connections with 4G core networks.
Response times for 5G phones haven’t been any better than 4G phones. 5G SA-based networks can offer a 40% improvement in latency, which, for an application such as gaming, could mean the difference between shooting a monster or being eaten by one.
There have been new 5G phones brought to market across a much wider range of price points, from $500 to more than $1,500. In addition to offerings from LG and OnePlus, Samsung is likely to introduce several 5G-capable phones next week. Apple will bring the first 5Gcapable iPhones to market in October based on hints from its earnings call.
From a pricing plan perspective, the good news is that most carriers don’t charge any kind of premium for 5G, although their range of plan options for 5G phones are typically limited to somewhat pricier unlimited plans.
The bottom line is that we are much closer to a good-quality 5G experience in the USA than we’ve ever been. After years of hype around the subject, it’s nice to see some of the early promises start to come to life. Plus, the good news about wireless network enhancements is that many of them will quietly improve, which will bring better performance to the 5G phones you can buy today or in the near future without you having to do anything.
That’s a concept I think we can all get behind.