T-Mobile Shows Why It's Still Too Early To Buy a 5G Phone (cnbc.com) 45
T-Mobile's nationwide 5G network launches on Friday, the company announced Monday morning. But don't fall for the marketing hype. From a report: It's still too early to buy a 5G phone, even though T-Mobile is now taking orders for two new ones, including the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ and OnePlus 7T Pro McLaren. It's still a big step, though. T-Mobile will turn on its 600 Mhz 5G network, which will cover most of the country. That's impressive, since most of the 5G networks you've heard about so far are only available in limited areas in a small number of cities. The trade-off though, is T-Mobile's network is using low-band 5G, which means it's good at providing slightly boosted speeds inside buildings and is available in far more places than what competitors offer. Some of the 5G Ultra Wideband networks you've heard about from AT&T and Verizon provide the opposite. They have super fast speeds, but only work in really small pockets when you're standing near a tower outside.
Even if UWB 5G were available here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I wouldn't care. The service I have right now is perfectly adequate for my needs. They should perhaps focus on bringing costs down rather than deploying unnecessary upgrades.
This.
Unless it can replace my home internet connection, I don't need it to be fast. Just reliable and unmetered.
Re: (Score:3)
This.
Unless it can replace my home internet connection, I don't need it to be fast. Just reliable and unmetered.
For most people, an unlimited LTE plan could easily replace their home internet connection.
The problem is, if everybody starts watching Netflix on LTE, speed will drop so that's why it will remains either expensive, throttled to low speed, or limited to small amounts of monthly data.
Re: (Score:3)
Ok, so the super duper 5G, even when rolled out, will do virtually nothing for people unless they are outdoors, in line of site of a tower.
How exactly will that benefit the majority of users.....especially those likely in need of it that are predominately INDOORS?
Is this
Re: (Score:2)
The main place this helps is sports stadiums, where you cram in 40k-100k people into a single location all with line of sight to internal cell "towers". It wont be the super fast 1gbps+ for everybody, but will be significantly better than what we have in most stadiums today. It is really seems like it is just a technology for short burst gatherings, rather than for day-to-day use.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, in that case, seems to be a whole lot of money to be spent, and new cell phones to be sold with new tech, and again as I m
Re: (Score:2)
Speed and range are inverse. For a given signal strength, to gain speed, you drop coding to lose bits. This gives you better range. Then, when you get close, your coding increases and speeds increase. The phone and tower negotiate the best speed fo
Windows are easier to see through than walls (Score:4, Interesting)
> Speed and range are inverse. For a given signal strength, to gain speed, you drop coding to lose bits.
In dry air, yes. It matters very much whether you're trying to send the signal through 1 meter of air or 1 meter thick steel.
Glass is transparent to visible light, drywall is opaque - visible light won't go through drywall very well at all. That's why you can see through the window, you can't see through the wall.
Drywall is also opaque at 28Ghz, the higher frequency range being proposed for 5G. One study measuring real-world signal penetration of actual walls found that the walls caused signal loss of 45db (99.5% signal loss).
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
At 5Ghz, indoor walls (drywall in each side) reduced signal by "only" 75%, with exterior walls of brick or other materials being more problematic. 5G at 5Ghz works poorly indoors, at 28Ghz it pretty much doesn't work.
Re: (Score:2)
Most of the US is not small urban areas where everyone is stacked upon each other like rats....
And even with that, I still understand that 5G doesn't penetrate walls that well, or, are they going to give everyone their own base station at home?
These are necessary for T-Mobile (Score:2)
This is by design. T-Mobile isn't after better speed with this rollout, they're making up for their deficiencies. 5G is pretty worthless given the data caps in existence. And given that Sprint and T-Mobile are about to merge, well, you're not getting lower costs. They might, but not you.
The best you can hope for out of American cell companies is
Re: (Score:2)
There are increasingly problems with congestion. This is the real problem 5G helps alleviate, even on sub mmWave bands.
Re: (Score:1)
Meanwhile (Score:3)
I'm about to cancel my phone's data connection. I rarely use it, except on holiday or an incidental skype video call or the maps when i have to drive to some new location. Got 20GB/month to spend for $20 and i don't use the frikking thing and its data simply because i don't like smartphones as a device.
Now i know that that seems unimaginable for anyone younger than, say, 25. And i'm not innocent, i've used the device in the last decade. But in the greater scheme of things, having a smartphone and 24/7 internet access appeared to be meaningless to me.
So, go ahead, roll out 5G. Meanwhile next time the screen of my smartphone breaks i'll be replacing it by a dumpphone and a $5 plan to make calls. The tech came, i used it, i'm fed up with it. I'll check again when 5/6/7G is cheaper than a landline for internet.
Data only (Score:2)
I did the opposite. I cancelled the voice/SMS service on my cell phone. Do you really need to call when on the go? I have a phone at work, and at home (both VoIP, no traditional landlines). For the rare occasions where I need to call on the go, I use a VoIP service on my cell phone.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you don't need to call. And maybe you don't like to pick up the phone, either. I don't, usually. But a couple of months back, for example, I was out and about and my girlfriend called to let me know she needed to go to the emergency room.
Re: (Score:2)
I understand perfectly the advantage of being reachable everywhere.
This is a good example of a situation where I would receive a message over the Internet. Or, if I really need to talk, can use VoIP.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe you don't need to call.
I bet most people with a voice plan don't need it either.
I'll take slow and wide over fast and narrow (Score:5, Insightful)
I have Verizon 5G on my Samsung S10 5G, and as nice as it is to get over 1Gbps standing on a certain block in Chicago, I would much rather have good connection out in the country and suburbs where I spend most of my time. Might be time to go back to T- mobile.
5G has a place .. (Score:3)
It's a little early to write it off entirely.
AT&T & Verizon use millimeter wave 5G, which is 10ghz+.
This tech has a range of tens to maybe 100 meters.
However, there's already administrative actions in motion to reuse C-band satellite spectrum for mobile 5G. So 4-8ghz (in parts).
That won't go as far as TMO's 600mhz spectrum, but it _does_ make it economically feasible to deploy high throughput 5G to wide areas, rather than the very very narrow corridors it's currently deployed.
And just to point out, that Sprint on 2.5ghz has the spectrum to deploy 5G with gigabit speeds now...
Outside the US I haven't seen the push, as 4G seems to be good enough for many areas.
It will always be too early. (Score:4, Insightful)
Since you can only get higher speeds with mote bandwidth and only get more bandwidth at higher frequencies and only get higher frequencies with direct line of sight since everything blocks them.
That is a hard physical limit, and no magic in the universe will ever make 5G fast enough to be any more than a a fusion of wifi and 4G in a single protocol.
Unless you plan on jamming everyone else and using a high-powered ultra-wide bandwidth radio, you will never see wifi speeds at 3G distances. Sorry.
I had hopes for that "private virtual base statiom via interference of real base station signals" technology. Which would be the best bet to fight this problem, from what I understood.
But since we never heard from that again it seems there was a catch there too.
Cell phone radiation kills birds. (Score:2)
Re: Cell phone radiation kills birds. (Score:2)
And I saw a documentary that proved Trump is a stable genius.
Re: (Score:1)
Hundreds of published studies thoroughly document the "non-thermal" effects of 3G and 4G on humans.
Five representatives of the telco industry told Sen Blumenthal in hearing that they had NO studies demonstrating the safety of 5G, nor did they have a budget for such studies.
Would any of us risk DNA damage, calcium channel disruption, or damage to the blood-brain barrier in return for faster download speeds?
https://bioinitiative.org/rese... [bioinitiative.org]
https://ehtrust.org/key-issues... [ehtrust.org]
https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/... [5gspaceappeal.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Awesome (Score:4, Informative)
Now my 2 hour streaming movie will download in 2 minutes instead of 15. It still plays exactly the same, but more is always better!
Re: (Score:2)
Just imagine how fast you'll hit your data cap of your "unlimited" plan!
More seriously, the case of streaming is actually really amusing when it comes to 5G. While in theory you'll have tons of bandwidth on your 5G connection, streaming services by design use Just-In-Time delivery so they buffer a few seconds or minutes of media ahead of the playhead and don't pull down more data until the playhead hits some particular time stamp (proportional to the buffered content).
This exists so streaming services don't
Fun fact: wait until iPhone XIII rolls out (Score:2)
Look, they're redesigning the cell provider chip for your phones, but it won't rollout until the iPhone 13 does, and if you just wait you can buy a secure SIM phone with real 5G that actually works, and have it be part of a slim iPhone SE3.
So just cool your jets.
Rushing won't get you better service, just more scam calls. For way too much money.
Phone companies are so skilled (Score:3)
Here we go again. Time to roll out new cell phone connectivity. It's only happened 6 or 7 times before, so naturally the phone companies will botch this roll out even worse than any prior one. So now both 600 MHz and 6 GHz will both be called 5G, while behaving radically differently. That won't be at all confusing.
Meanwhile the much ballyhooed 700 MHz spectrum auction in which Google participated is now more than a decade old and after all their shenanigans to trigger the FCC's open network, services, devices, and applications rules, what have we got? Can you tell the difference? Feeeel that openness... Or have the incumbent asshole companies continued their incumbent asshole ways? I'm thinking they have.
I'd like to hear how anything is better, if anybody can actually be specific.
Upgrade Choices (Score:1)
AT&T - N5, N260
Sprint - N41
T-mobile - N71, N260, N261
Verizon - N261
Or how about just buying a 5G hotspot on the carrier of your choice for the first few generations (if you have all of the 4G bands you need on your phone for VoLTE).
Upgrading phones and keeping track of what carriers use which 4G/5G bands is more of a hassle than it needs to be, as well as a bad investment for "baby 5G".
We'll have to wait and see what 2020 holds for low/mid-tier 5G chipsets
Comment removed (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
5G is yet another marketing scam (Score:2)
Buy new equipment, pay a higher subscription and in return we promise to deliver nothing more than what you're currently getting.
5G is not appreciably better than 4G at current cell frequencies and bandwidth.
Higher frequencies require last mile infrastructure build outs nobody is willing to make except in very specific cases.
Actually, the plan is to roll out 5G in all bands (Score:1)
Since 2G and 3G are due to be "sunseted" in 2025 in pretty much the whole developed world, the plan is to have 4G and 5G in every band.
You see, the mm wave (5G only) band is for "venues" (say, stadiums, convention centres like freia de madrid and fira de Barcelona) and places where people, you know, walk on the street, like boulevards, historic city centres (think ile of paris, trocadero, puerta del sol), parks (tivoli gradens, disneyland *, busch gardens).
Low band (600-900Mhz) is for blanket coverage of wh
Freedom! (Score:2)
only work in really small pockets when you're standing near a tower outside
Hopefully these towers will draw the drooling phone obsessed crowd like a bug zapper. The rest of use will finally be free of them.
but what if I don't want it? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
For 10 seconds? Really? (Score:2)