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I've seen an interesting corollary: 4G on an airplane at the gate is much faster than the 5G microcells inside the terminal.

If I'm downloading podcasts for a flight, I do it on WiFi beforehand or on 4G on the plane. 5G in the terminal is really useful at getting you some service, but it's slow.

Probably a side effect of not enough backhaul speed.

I thought that's why many large venues offer free WiFi.

AT&T has figured out a way to monetize that. If you have a "Turbo" plan or add-on, your phone will work in crowded cells.

If you don't, good luck with that.

and that has definitely improved everybody's experience at concerts /s

This doesnt seem to match reality?

e.g. Notably several major carriers in India skipped 3G entirely and went to 4G directly because it was cheaper per subscriber. Which implies less expensive equipment per unit performance?

5G mm is vaporware. Virtually no one uses it (especially globally) and it is expected to be stripped out within a generation or two.

sure but is anyone deploying mmwave outside of maybe sports stadiums? I'm not exactly going to get it on my commuter train or at work.

My phone clearly shows me when I'm on 5G vs 5G mmWave.

There’s always a gradual refarming of the spectrum into the next G. Usually the most penetrating frequencies (ie lowest) are kept on the lower G to maximize legacy support.

For a while I had my phone stick to 3G, which doesn’t support emergency alerts, because my jurisdiction kept sending them out for joint custody disputes at 3AM 1000km away. It was fine But the 3G became unbearable and they tightened up the alert criteria.

The difference between 4G and (non-SA) 5G is fairly small compared to earlier generations. They use the same core network, and it’s actually quite possible to be connected to 4G and still see the 5G logo.

These tricks are less common in Germany though, as far as I’ve seen, so seeing 5G can serve as a weak proxy for “the carrier has at least touched this base station in the last few years”, which increases the chance they’ve upgraded its spectrum or backhaul a little bit.

Really depends on the concrete situation, though. Having a small 4G cell with 20 MHz of spectrum to yourself beats an overloaded large 5 MHz rural 5G site any day.

I’d you have a 5G phone and plan but see 4G, that usually means you are at the very edge of coverage. Thats not the experience 4G was or still is if you are in a well covered area (which would have 5G available as well)

Interesting; in Australia I'm using exclusively 4G with no problems

ATT did a lot of this, android has a ‘feature’ they utilize to inflate the signal bar: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

3G has been shut down in several countries to free up frequencies. 2G was also shut down in several countries, it seems to be still up in most european countries with shut downs being scheduled in the next few years up to 2030.

'best' is relative here; lower bands travel further, which is great for maximizing coverage footprint, but not great for high-density. Each node can only handle so much traffic, and you can pack them in more densely with short-range spectrum. mmWave really is the best frequency for very high density, high capacity networks, but the bottleneck is you have to deploy all the extra nodes to get the coverage.

More likely, data usage has increased greatly in your area since 3G was still available and your carriers spectrum or backhaul hasn’t caught up. 4G/5G make things more efficient but ultimately can’t fight physics.

That’s most likely because of the massive amounts of midband spectrum that became available for 5G use in the US and less so due to any inherent advantage of 5G.

Also if I had a dollar for every end user residential consumer (as a person who runs ISPs) that confuses "5G" with "5 GHz wifi". Like, when your install techs have to explain to a customer why they're getting shit performance in the default 20MHz wide 2.4 GHz channel, and to reconfigure all their devices in a house to talk to a 802.11ax/802.11be 3x3 or 4x4 80 MHz channel AP in the 5.x GHz band.

Consumers literally don't know the difference between cellular/LTE carrier "5G" marketing and the "5 GHz" band on their home router now.

Increasingly less so. 2G to 3G was a very clear cut on the radio side (TDMA to CDMA); 4G changed both the radio side (OFDMA) and the core (no more circuit switching, more Internet-standards-like).

5G is already much less clear: 5G non-SA literally depends on 4G for signaling and uses 5G-NR (which itself is still OFDMA) only for user data. 5G SA changes the core network again, but isn’t even supported in many networks worldwide.

There are huge jumps in bandwidth within a generation too. 3G started out with circuit-switched-ish 384 kbit/s and ended with 40+ Mbit/s on HSPA+. The jump from that to early LTE was much smaller in comparison.

So in a way, the model of “every once in a while, the carriers and manufacturers bundle up a bunch of optional extensions and call it (n+1)” seems to be coming for 3GPP just like it already has for e.g. 802.11.

Tell that to the cellular industry marketing people who decided to put "4.5G" on things. Also not everything that is marketed "5G" is equal in capability, there's a myriad of different bands in different regulatory regimes in the world, some of which go through material like brick/concrete much better than others. You'll see "5G" connections that have speed tests in an urban area that top out at 50 Mbps downstream and others where you'll have 850 Mbps.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_frequency_bands

Even within a category such as "4G" there have been significant advances in some radio capabilities since it was introduced, like MU-MIMO, vs early "4G".

There's a very large number of different things that are all being marketed as "5G" now, so it's really a drastic oversimplification to try to say that all 5G is the same thing. Do you not remember the very early days of "3G" when cellular carriers were trying to market EDGE/GPRS as if it was 3G?

The "G" marketing gets especially confused in the US where carriers branded EDGE as "3G" and HSPA+ as "4G"

>A bit like the sure signal thingies that Vodafone used to sell but multi provider ideally.

They're still readily available.

But yeah think this would need a legislative push to solve. Force high rises to host multi provider relays as you say and hook it into their fiber links.

> What would really help is the easy provisioning of signal boosters.

But that's also a physics thing. Plain same-frequency boosters hamper frequency reuse on neighbor cells, so less bandwidth for you. And if boosters run on a separate band, you'd need to do frequency planning for them just like it's done for cells now.

Wireless is finicky, we should really avoid using it everywhere wired can be used instead.

I think we should use hex for brevity since consumers get confused by long numbers. We should also add adjective noun pairs to make them more memorable. And we can also add a paid sponsorship slot.

Ex 6G = 8B.9 verizon cool blue and 7G = A0.D costco ultra red or similar.

(/s)

This is an underrated point. PCIe, DRAM, and WiFi standards are similar. I watched a YouTube video about how PCIe 6.0 was developed, and, damn, the pipeline is long and very complex. Even test equipment has a separate/parallel pipeline.

The 5G standard is a bit of a mess. In the US we heavily rolled out 5G NSA, which means you still have a 4G network core with both 4G and 5G radios at the edge. You get a chunk of the performance benefits without having to replace the network core first.

This usually has similar (in practice) performance characteristics to LTE Advanced.

5G SA is an actual, end to end 5G network. The two biggest wins here for an end user are reduced latency (a big focus in 5G) and reduced power usage (the phone doesn’t need a simultaneous 4G connection).

5G SA means real 5G. 5G NSA means 4G over 5G NR.

They created an option to use just the 5G radio modem parts with 4G tower equipment to run them in the "Non-StandAlone" mode, so that telcos can start deploying 5G before even it matures. And the modem parts and their specs are called "5G New Radio", which is one of names of all time.

SA means standalone meaning real 5G.

NSA is non stand alone meaning basically 4G with some 5G backwards compatible improvements.

Just because your phone shows 5G doesn't mean it's connected to a 5G station. It also can only be a signaled flag from a 4G station.

2G -> 3G -> 4G were all massive jumps that all enabled new use cases.

I doubt majority of phone users who have a decent 4G connection would notice the difference if they upgrade to 5G.

On raw coverage of 5g, only a few much denser countries are better. You live in basically the best 4g and 5g covered, sparsely populated country on earth :) most countries are not just further behind.

> I guess other countries are further behind?

Yes, and even in Europe. The demand-led need was badly misunderstood or anticipated in my opinion as operators were hesitant to invest (and some big ones still are). In this sense, 7G is a pipe dream (but of course worth researching as such).

Lucky you. On some parts of my commute, in an urban area of 10M people, I am happy if I get some 3G.

Don't just look at the indicator on your phone though. Providers are free to scheme with those. Some honestly show the icon when you are on 5G. Others use the option of showing it when you are on 4G (not even 5G NSA) but the network offers 5G on the cell.

The marketing guys got involved with this indicator and completely ruined its trustworthiness.

With 5G in particular I think it's important that people talk about which specific technologies they're referring to.

In the US at least, low-band or extended range 5G is widely available and has been for some time (and I'm talking about the "real" 5G low-band, not the BS marketing speak AT&T used for a while). Mid and high band 5G, or 5G ultra capacity, is much less available but if course it only really makes sense in dense cities.

I'm surprised that low band 5G isn't widely available in most 1st world countries, as again it's been here in the US for many years now.

Yes, why working on something that "may" be beneficial in the far future? This is like inventing a 128-bit CPU architecture. Nobody would be able to utilize like even 1% of that, even with AI.

> It was also meant for offices as a managed WiFi replacement. Stuff like that. In this vision every laptop would have 5G built in and could work anywhere. It just didn't take off because of the chicken egg problem. Not many phones with mmWave. Not many providers with it.

It did not took off because the whole sales pitch was utter nonsense. Why would anyone put 3rd party 5G BTS inside their buildings and then pay for data, when they can use WiFi for free + they control the network so they can decide how data are shared between stations and which stations are allowed to be logged in.

I can see that 6G is pitching... exactly same thing. Which predictably is going to fail... on exactly same issue.