Testing 5G: Hype vs. Reality

5G is not one thing

The branding pretty much spells things out - this is the next iteration in mobile network connectivity. Except that doesn't really tell the whole story, for 5G is not one thing, it's two things from one point of view, and also two from another. We'll address these here.

Sub-6 vs. mmWave

5G technology can be applied to different bands, which is where this differentiator comes in. "Sub-6" is a catch-all for any band that sits below 6GHz. Incidentally, that space is also where all the previous digital mobile networks (starting from 2G onwards) have been operating so far.

"mmWave", on the other hand, uses bands much higher than were ever used before for this specific purpose, 26-28GHz. Note, however, that very high GHz bands are not a new thing per se, they have been in use before, just not to deliver your mobile internet.

The discussion about bands always comes down to one simple thing. Regardless of which "G" we're talking about, lower bands allow for more coverage per tower, while higher bands come with smaller coverage but faster possible speeds. This is compounded somewhat by the amount of bandwidth each carrier allocates to 5G in each of its bands, but the gist of it still holds true.

So mmWave networks on 26-28GHz can deliver much higher speeds than a Sub-6 network on, say 3500MHz, but at the expense of much higher signal attenuation. This goes up with the band, so the higher the band, the more attenuation. And that's why for mmWave to fully envelope a city, a carrier will need an order of magnitude more towers than if it was using something between 3-6GHz, for example.

Regardless of technology (which "G" we're talking about), low bands are usually not a good fit in densely populated areas exactly because of their superior coverage - this might seem like the best idea from a cost perspective, because hey you can cover a city with just a few towers. While that's theoretically true, in practice that network would very soon be useless, for all intents and purposes, because of the inherent crowding stemming from the fact that each cell has a limited capacity of devices it can allow to be connected at any one time. There are also issues with handover between towers in such a configuration, whether for 5G or 4G or 3G, and just trying to find the best possible placements for them would be a nightmare.

All of this theory also rings true for 4G, for example. So the usual setup for carriers is using low bands in the outskirts, for smaller towns, and in rural areas, and then going mid-band (by the 5G definition) in densely populated areas, to allow for more capacity, both in terms of how many devices can be connected at the same time over a given area, but also with regard to sheer data bandwidth. Now with 4G, 2600MHz networks are technically high band, because there aren't a lot of higher bands being used for that across the globe, and yet things are going much higher with 5G.

Throughout most of the world the prevailing 5G band right now is 78, which is around 3500MHz, and even if this is higher than the highest 4G bands, it still counts as mid-band in 5G parlance. It is used extensively right now because 5G rollouts (like all previous new G rollouts) usually happen in the biggest cities first. There, for the initial stages, it makes sense to allow for a decent compromise between coverage (and thus the number of towers needed to blanket a city with signal) and capacity.

This is also helped by the fact that intrinsically 5G has more capacity per same bandwidth amount than 4G, it can serve more devices simultaneously while doing it faster. And of course, you can use 5G on any band, at least theoretically. Band 78 is the star right now because in a lot of places it happened to be unused for 2/3/4G. In the future, carriers will surely 'refarm' existing bands they use for 2/3/4G for 5G, once that becomes economically advantageous. Dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) will even allow for the exact same spectrum to be used for both 4G and 5G at the same time.

With all this in mind, note that all the hype regarding 5G isn't necessarily disingenuous, but it can be misleading if you take marketing statements as fact. Regardless of implementation, 5G will be, pound for pound as they say, faster than 4G, provided that your carrier isn't using less spectrum / bandwidth for it than it does for 4G of course. There is also has the theoretical benefit of lower latencies - if only because it needs fiber connections to every tower. In 4G land, some carriers use higher latency wireless microwave links between some sites, especially more remote ones, because it didn't make sense to invest in fiber to connect every single one. In some extreme cases even satellites, with huge latency costs.

That will change for 5G. So, 5G will be faster for you than 4G, there's no doubt about that. And yet, when people say it will be "10x" or even "20x" faster, they are probably comparing 4G speeds today to mmWave 5G implementations, and the truth is that most of the world may never see any of those. It's just very expensive to roll that out on any sort of massive scale, and there aren't any huge incentives to do so.

Verizon in the US has so far been the poster child for mmWave, and its rollout basically serves as a cautionary tale.

Verizon has invested a lot but its mmWave coverage pales in comparison to T-Mobile's Sub-6 coverage, even if Verizon rules in speed tests... if you take into account the huge caveat of attenuation. Even if you have a 5G tower right across from your building, you may need to physically be outside in front of it to get the earth-shattering speeds that are marketed. Radio waves that are so high on the spectrum simply don't travel well through... anything, including raindrops and foliage.

So while Verizon's rollout is an interesting experiment, what's more likely to happen overall is that most carriers across the world will have some form of Sub-6 5G, while mmWave may become a niche thing that is used to compete with wired internet connections. In such a use case, your carrier could give you a dedicated modem, which will have much bigger antennas than could ever fit in your phone, hence less attenuation and less of the inherent disadvantages of the high bands being strung your way. This is all just speculation on our part, of course.

Our point is that for most people, 5G will be Sub-6, and Sub-6 5G is indeed markedly faster than 4G, only not by a factor of 10.

If you adjust your expectations towards something like 2x-3x speed improvement with 5G, we think that's much more realistic.

We'll also be talking about 5G phones and whether it makes sense to get one now, since you may be wondering about that too. We'll also share our tests with a live, commercial Sub-6 network to see what's what.

NSA vs SA

There's another "two types of 5G" thing going on, and that's the fact that there are NSA (aka NonStandAlone) as well as SA (aka StandAlone) 5G implementations. Most, right now, are NSA, and what this means is that the 5G network is dependent on a 4G network in order to function, it can't live without piggybacking off that 4G.

The initial 5G rollouts are almost always NSA, because it's just cheaper and less complicated to do it this way. Not just that, but in NSA 5G, the most basic setups use 4G for uploads, and only attributes downloads to 5G. The next step is uploading over 5G, and then the next step after that is a fully standalone 5G implementation, also known as SA.

These are going to pop up more and more in the next few months and years, and SA networks are "true" 5G, in that they are expected to deliver all of the benefits, without being tethered to 4G.

It's going to probably be a slow rollout going from NSA to SA, but the important thing to note here is it's not just the networks, it's also the terminals you intend to use with them.

You might be surprised to learn that most of the smartphones with 5G support launched in 2019 are NSA-only.

If you want to buy a new 5G-capable smartphone and you want it to be as future proof as possible, go with something that supports both NSA and SA.

All of the high-end and mid-range 5G chipsets launched in 2020 should be able to do both.

The future is bright (?)

There are a lot of promises being made about 5G, and how it will revolutionize the somehow-still-nascent Internet-of-Things (IoT) with low latencies and higher number of devices connected at the same time to the same tower. How many of those things will pan out remains to be seen, as this is just the latest thing to be said to finally make IoT really take off. It's been a while, and it hasn't, so who knows.

We are quite a ways off from a world in which our fridge is talking to our car through 5G, telling it to remind us to pick up milk on the way home. When 5G SA rollouts are fully in swing, the technical capabilities for such things to happen will definitely all be there, but that's not all that's needed. There also will have to be companies figuring out use cases for all this connectedness, use cases that make sense - beyond the "self-driving vehicles talking to one another" thing you may have heard repeated ad nauseam.

Sure, that's a good one, but at the moment there really aren't many more 'killer' use-cases for 5G. That doesn't mean there will never be any. As history has shown in the past, sometimes we just need the technology to be there first, to become the new normal, and then new and innovative ways to use it will invariably start cropping up.

Before broadband wired internet became a thing, few people could have imagined YouTube, or Netflix, or Google Maps existing in the future. And even if they could, even fewer would have imagined how widely used those services will be.

And with 5G, we might now be at an important juncture in time - right before entirely new services are born and getting ready to take off - ones we could have never imagined.

We say this to try and dampen a lot of cries we see everywhere, going along the lines of "5G is useless", "4G is more than anyone needs". Just because we can't see an obvious killer feature that 5G would enable, doesn't mean it won't appear. Or rather, many more than just one.

Finally, note that "4G is more than enough" is a very personal remark. For one user, 4G at an average of 10-12Mbps down could be that, but they would never imagine downloading big files or watching HDR video streams on this connection. They probably already have another faster internet connection at their disposal for these tasks. As you can see, the provided speed is already shaping the way we use mobile broadband. So 5G can take this to the next level.

Sure, there's a point of diminishing returns when it comes to speed. We can even arbitrarily set such a point at, say 50Mbps or 100Mbps, and then proclaim that anything more is just a fool's errand. History, however, cautions us not to be so quick to judge.