Technology

There's physics reasons that 5g is theoretically faster, while also having lower range. It's related to the frequency used. All other things being equal, higher frequency radio waves attenuate faster in any given medium than lower frequency waves. (Their range would effectively be identical in a vacuum.) But, the total number of waves you can transmit in any given period is inversely proportional to attenuation.

As you approach a bitrate that is equal to the frequency, you start to run up against the limits of physics in terms of how much information you can transmit. Choosing a frequency arbitrary to illustrate: 900 MHz. At 900MHz, there are 900 million waves going out per second. In some perfect universe, you could turn the signal on/off up to 900 million times per second, giving you a theoretical bitrate of 900Mbit, or 112MB/s. In reality, you never approach this limit, due to error correction and a bunch of other things, so you might get a tenth of that speed as your practical maximum from an engineering perspective. So maybe 10MB/s. There are other tricks you can do, like MIMO on multiple adjacent frequencies, but that is a digression.

But if you go from 900 MHz to 2.4GHz, you automatically gain a reprieve from the physics, allowing you to potentially gain 2.7x the speed. Amazing! Only, now the signal is absorbed by materials 2.7x faster, and has trouble penetrating through walls as well and such. Yikes!

So you have a tradeoff. 4G is a lower frequency than 5G. 5G makes more sense in very dense open environments: stadiums, concerts, busy outdoor markets, etc. where you need a lot of bandwidth in a small area without a lot of obstacles. 4G will penetrate the walls of your house better, at lower theoretical top speeds. Phones can and should switch to whatever is optimal for the environment you're in.

We're near the limit of physics on these things and I don't expect things will evolve a lot more from here.

Similar experience here. I rely on mobile broadband for home internet and was okay for many years on LTE. Speeds up to 110mbps, at worst 30mbps during peak hours.

Around a year ago my carrier installed 5G equipment on a local tower (300 meters away), I got a €300 5G modem/router and for a brief moment got whopping 130mbps. Not the best purchase but at least I'm future-proof, I thought.

Then network stability went to the toilet. It's a bit better when I disable 5G (🙃). I thought it might be my new modem but old one has same issues. My guess 5G equipment is not only overhyped but also buggy as hell. Obviously anecdotal evidence and ymmv.

just did a fast.com speed test at work, where I've got both 4G and 5G coverage. 30 Mbps on 4G, 12 Mbps on 5G.

What network are you on? T-Mobile pretty much has the only true 5G network and it’s much quicker than LTE. The rest of the carriers are still upgrading from their LTE backhauls.

I never needed more than 4G on the go. I wouldn't mind 5G but I won't pay extra for it especially because the data caps are always too low.

I think 4G was a lot of speed for mobile devices but I must say the speeds on 5G are quite impressive. I can get about 50-70mbit/s with 4G on my phone while 5G does 300+. Do I ever need that? No.

I think it would have been better to invest in better coverage with 4G.

And now everywhere we have cell towers sticking out of the ground with little consideration for where it is.

This is 5g, sitting inside a house with aluminum siding in the very spot where I never saw above 5mbit with 4g. Far from hype.

The promises of massive speed boosts were met. 5g is insanely fast compared to 4g in my area, and I don't live in a massive metropolitan area.