5G Phones - Your Experiences

It's worth it for future proofing, and you can always switch the 5g off. I have an Iphone 13 pro, and when I'm in London 3's network seems to run better than when I was on their 4g network. Having said that I live in a small town so there's no 5g here.

5G isn;t the miracule cure that everyone suggests, and some 5g, is technically 4g apparantly (the cell towers connection to the internet is a limiting factor I think)

Not worth much thought.
Getting a new phone? Get the one you like. If it comes with 5G, great.

I’ve not noticed any difference in performance between 5G and 4G on either Vodafone or EE. YMMV.

Network coverage either way is shocking compared with my experience outside of the U.K.

you can always switch the 5g off.

Ah, hadn't realised that. So yes sounds like it is worth getting one.

I live in a pretty rural area and I have had 90-100MB/s from our 4G mast

Not sure how much more I could ever need, at least until I start streaming 16K video or some other equally pointless notion.

I think my Google Pixel 6 is 5G enabled...I don't get it where I am, but I've been in Manchester and I did have 5G, but I didn't find it any quicker than the 4G I was getting where the 5G wasn't available.

What I have found though is pretty much everything below 4G now is far far slower than it was before. I'm a creature of habit so tend to have 4 or 5 websites I visit (and have done for quite some time)...2 haven't changed since before 4G was standard so I remember the download times and they were much shorter on 3G or H or whatever it is back then than it is now.

Aware the older, slower networks are being removed, but the 4G and 5G stuff isn't quite as reliable and consistent as it probably should be. Very much depends on where in the country you are.

I don't think it will make much odd if you get a 5G phone now or wait until later...

If you run a speed test on 5g you will be amazed at the speeds - but as decent 4g meets the needs of nearly all mobile uses including video you don't really notice it that much. I think I read that 5G needs far more masts as the signal doesn't travel as far so it will always be limited to v high population areas where it is worth their while to flood it with masts and provide the bandwidth to '000s of users.

you can always switch the 5g off.

Ah, hadn’t realised that. So yes sounds like it is worth getting one.

Why would you? Mine varies between 4 and 5G seamlessly.

I live in a pretty rural area and I have had 90-100MB/s from our 4G mast

Not sure how much more I could ever need

Data transfer speed isn't really the issue. As I understand it, your browsing experience will be better for the same headline figure with 5G because the latency is lower and it'll respond quicker; but there are many more slots available so in busy places it'll continue to respond better. I often get one bar on 5G but it's still snappier than 4G. I have no idea what the actual data transfer rate is. It doesn't really matter as at these speeds the time taken to actually transfer the data for a webpage is less than the time taken to connect to the network and route your message. Or, increasingly, the time taken to get the actual data from the server you are accessing. Certainly in the case of STW this is by far the biggest delay, as you'd expect from a small organisation with a lot of users (this isn't a dig!).

That said, the difference is still marginal. I wanted 5G but I was buying a fancy phone and I like things being snappy. But 4G works fine still. The actual network you are on makes more difference, IME. By which I mean how many users there are in a given area and how many data slots they are fighting over, and how good the connection to the cell tower is.

But the real reason it exists is to massively increase the capacity, as we are running out of 4G radio bandwidth. When 4G came out there were two devices in our household using it. Now we have four phones, possibly the broadband backup, a car, a car charger, two e-readers, and maybe a smart electricity meter - not sure.

If you run a speed test on 5g you will be amazed at the speeds

be very careful how much you do this. using the speedtest.net app for instance burns through 500Mb of data doing a speedtest on 5g (here in Sheffield on a fast 5g connection).

The article is pretty alarming, but I suspect it's just folks encountering the odd issue and making a fuss about it.

Didn't Bill Gates invent 5G for mind control purposes so the lizard people can take over?

Anyway, I digress. Pixel 6 here which is 5G enabled but flips between that and 4G in our area. No real difference. Just ran a speed test on 4G and it's faster than our home broadband. I have an iPhone 11 for work which is 4G only and I tether to that when working anywhere that isn't the office or home and I've never had connectivity or speed issues.

The article is pretty alarming, but I suspect it’s just folks encountering the odd issue and making a fuss about it.

That's what I hoped but thought I'd just check here to get some "real life" experiences.

I think the speed isn’t so much the issue as it’s the sites rather than the connection speed there the bottle neck- it’s more an Issue of contention.  I’ve worked in a few places -often city centre office areas - where there’s plenty of bars for calls but no usable data - can’t get emails, google maps timess out trying to plan a route. Probably because all around me there’s a high density of folk who are browsing on their phones while they work. Come 6pm suddenly it’s all working again.

And that’s what the article is taking about - being in busy environments like gigs and not getting data. There was a promise that 5g would be better for that but maybe people’s demands have grown faster than the increase in capacity. I big part of that might be people option for 5G over broadband

There was a promise that 5g would be better for that

It is in principle, you can fit many more connections into the same radio signal. But of course, enough capacity has to be deployed for that to work.

5G caused the coronavirus - Remember people were setting fire to the 5G masts to try and stop it 🤣 Some incredibly stupid people unwittingly burned down 3G & 4G sites 🙄 🤣

So what is going on?

The industry insists, still only three years in to a 10-year rollout plan, everything is fine.

^^ This ^^

Even with my 4 covid jabs I’ve only seen 5G service briefly on my phone twice

be very careful how much you do this. using the speedtest.net app for instance burns through 500Mb of data doing a speedtest on 5g (here in Sheffield on a fast 5g connection).

Seconded - I got caught out amazing myself at >900Mbps speeds. A 10Gb data allowance doesn't go very far.

Aside from the speeds that I've seen with 5G, which can vary between 'similar to 4G' and 'holy sh*t balls', the ping is generally a lot shorter on 5G than 4G, which is what is going to make things feel a lot snappier than 4G under normal use, even when mega download speeds are irrelevant.

Entirely depends if you can get signal, remembering that a typical 5g mast will have a usable range limit of about 2km, and that's with an uninterrupted line of sight. Put houses, trees, or anything solid in between and that reduces that range significantly.

And yes the backhaul is still the same as the 4g network but most 5g masts will have 1 or 10gig backhaul connections. And the upload is still handled by the 4g connection.

Despite all the above, I've been a very happy user of 5g home broadband for the past 2 years, getting anywhere between 100mbps to 800mbps download speeds depending on the mast and house location.

That's with Three, and I'm just about to move from EE to Three (Smarty) on my phone SIM as they have much better 5g coverage in my local area.

Currently I get 600-800mbps down, 30-50mbps up and ping of 8-15ms depending on the time of day, my mast is visible from a top floor window and is about 300m away.

I've got two 5g phones (home and work) and travel up to London regularly. After several times when both claimed to have strong 5g signal but were unable to stream the podcast or download the emails, I've turned off 5g and use 4g now.

I don't see it that often in Derbyshire, but get it working in Hertford. It's super fast.

What I have noticed, that when in my tin box caravan and only have 1 bar, it still does everything it should - hotspot for smart TV, streams Hi-res music. 1 or 2 bars on 4g there would be no chance.

It’s only really EE and 3 that are rolling out fast 5G. Voda’s rollout is for network speeds typically around 1/4 that of 3.

3 have put quite a lot of new masts us round by us - the 5G speeds are consistently crazy fast - up to 1400Mbps on downloads and 180Mbps on uploads.

Our home broadband is also on 3 - for £10 a month we get 400Mbps downloads and 130Mbps uploads with an outdoor router.

For breadth of coverage / quality of service EE is probably the network to beat - in Somerset they have loads of 5G deployed whereas Voda / o2 have nothing in a 30 mile radius.

Had a 5g phone for a whileand 3 switched on the mast here back in Jan. Amazing.
Consistently over 1000/150Mb up/down. Now tether my phone to my laptop for most work stuff.

I'm on 3 just to put some clarity to my previous post.

My other phone is Vodafone as that was seemingly the best network at my home address. For supposedly the biggest provider, they really are a bit poo. Also, you'd think one of the biggest communication giants would actually have a usable website, rather than some pos that acts like it's operating from a teenage techys bedroom

I think next year 5G will improve. The main reason is that 3G is being switched off, similar to the USA last year. This frees up bandwidth on the backbone networks and with the installation of new 5G masts both the backend and front end will start to align.

im still not sure how areas like the Scottish Highlands and Islands will fare as faster speeds, generally mean smaller coverage areas per mast, which means more masts, infrastructure.

The main reason is that 3G is being switched off, similar to the USA last year.

What fun! Where I live, in North Wiltshire, it’s not unusual to be getting a signal on 3G! So, if the networks are going to be shutting that off, where’s that going to leave people living In largely rural areas who still can’t get a 4G signal, let alone something with decent bandwidth for data. Especially when banks are closing town centre branches, using the ‘well everyone uses online banking’ excuse.

My super whizzy, all singing, all dancing new smartphone has 5G capabilities, with an appropriate SIM; to take advantage I’ve either got to go thirty miles west to Bristol, or a hundred miles east to London.
#rollseyes

They won't just shut it off without putting something else in place.

But, as I can't resist a dig this morning - you live in the countryside, should've thought of that before you moved there 🙂