Is it too much to ask for some honesty over the rollout of 5G, asks a despairing Jon Honeyball
Among the Great Unpleasantness of 2020, there is something we should be grateful for. A thing that will make our lives better and more fulfilled, and help with the daily grind. I am, of course, referring to 5G. I shall now remove my tongue from my cheek. I know 5G is something that I should be superexcited about because Apple told me so during its recent launch of the iPhone 12. Apparently, it features 5G. Not just any old 5G, but real and proper FIVE GEEEEE!
This is amazing, transformative, game changing. It’s a brand-new era of mobile communications, and vendors and consultants keep telling me that it’s much more than just something for your phone. It will impact every aspect of our daily lives, and we should be positively trembling at the possibilities.
Yes, I know that those techno-upstarts at Samsung have been doing 5G for a while. I bought the company’s Galaxy S20 Ultra phone a while ago, and it’s proven to be a fine device. Not once have I seen the magical 5G symbol, though. Perhaps it’s my fault for not daring to go into London this year.
This difference between Apple and Samsung is important. Samsung dares to rush ahead, and is prepared to make significant mistakes in its rather public progress. Witness the history of folding screen devices, for example. Apple is much more conservative, waiting for others to iron out the issues so that it can sweep in with something “utterly magical” and claim it was Apple’s idea all along.
So the release of 5G iPhones left me, at first, somewhat conflicted. This is a technology that can’t be used in a vacuum: it relies upon infrastructure. It’s somewhat galling when I read tweets from friends who have managed to find that sweet spot just in front of St Pancras station where their 5G logo lights up, and a speed test indicates a throughput measured in the hundreds of megabits a second. I presume they’re holding their breath and not daring to move, or even twitch, when doing this.
At length, in a fit of self-justifying “man logic”, I decided that maybe I did need to upgrade from my trusty iPhone 11 Pro Max to a new iPhone 12 Pro Max with FIVE GEEEEE! The Lidar camera is interesting, as is the MagSafe charging mount, but neither of these is enough to make me splash out a four-figure sum. The promise of 5G, however, might – despite it appearing that millimetre-wave (mmWave) 5G is only going to be available in the US and nowhere else. Oh, and that it seems that 5G SIMs and plans don’t roam internationally on 5G. I looked again at my Galaxy S20 Ultra with its 5G-enabled Vodafone SIM and still saw it forlornly reporting 4G.
Before I clicked on the “Buy now” button, I went to the coverage checker map on the Vodafone website and found that London was the closest location with 5G support. The whole of the east of
England was smothered with a wash of “no coverage”. I clicked on the “Coming in three months” button and nothing changed. Oh wait, there’s a tiny splodge coming to the east of Norwich – probably just one test tower. I checked the maps for EE and BT, and all of them have patchy coverage in a few cities, with no published timescales for further deployment.
I accept that a change of this size is not something that can be done overnight. It’s a long and involved process, requiring changes across the whole infrastructure. I’m sure that the rejection of the Huawei 5G infrastructure has doubtless added uncertainty to the plans, as the companies scrabble to find alternative solutions.
But the current situation has gone beyond a joke. Outside of a few locations, 5G is turning into a technological The Emperor’s New Clothes. It’s as if everyone has gone slightly mad singing the 5G song and no one has noticed that there’s nothing there.
It really is about time that the whole 5G hysteria came to a halt. Surely Ofcom should be making companies like BT, EE, T-Mobile and Vodafone publicly state what is going to happen and when? I don’t even mind if it’s going to be many years away – I’m far more concerned that in the meantime I get a reliable and workable 4G signal. It shouldn’t be necessary for me to have both Vodafone and EE SIMs in my phone, in the often vain hope that one of them will supply a workable data connection.
The time for singing the 5G song has passed. As we head into an uncertain 2021, it’s time for openness and honesty instead.
It’s as if everyone has gone slightly mad singing the 5G song and no one has noticed that there’s nothing there