TCL 10 5G UW hands-on: Verizon 5G speed test

Hunting for 5G in Miami

Currently, there are three cities in South Florida with Verizon's 5G Ultra Wideband: Miami, Tampa, and Panama City. Fun fact, Miami is the southernmost market with mmWave 5G.

In Miami, there's mmWave 5G coverage in areas around downtown, inside the Miami International Airport, some high-transit parts of Little Havana, and the touristy areas around South Beach.

For our testing, we went down to Bayfront Park in downtown Miami and as soon as we saw the towers, we knew to look for the "5G UW" signal in the phone's status bar. Of course, this is the thing about mmWave 5G - if you lose line of sight, you lose signal.

Verizon's 5G UW network (mmWave) is on the 28 and 39GHz bands. These frequencies are several times higher than those normally used in any LTE band. As a result, the throughput is much higher, reaching download speeds of nearly 2 Gbps. The consequence of these frequencies and speeds is that the range (ability to reach signal from the node) is severely shorter than an LTE tower. Therefore, a denser mesh of nodes is needed to blanket mmWave 5G coverage in an area and is thus more expensive to roll out.

There were perhaps about a dozen of these access towers spread around the park we visited - which isn't very large, to begin with - it spans about four by two and a half city blocks. We sat down at a spot between two nodes and fired up the Ookla SpeedTest app. Here are a few speed test results recorded with the TCL 10 5G and the LG Wing 5G (also on Verizon).

Notice how the speeds are more consistent with the TCL 10 5G UW than the LG Wing 5G, despite both having the same Snapdragon 765G SoC with Qualcomm X52 5G modem. I could only hypothesize that the 5G antennas were more prone to interference due to the funky, swinging display.

In a sort of real-world test, I downloaded a video from Google Drive on each phone. The video is the one we use to run battery tests for our endurance scores, and it weighs in at 833MB. On the TCL 5G UW it took 18.44s to download. Meanwhile, the LG Wing took 9.76s to download the same file.

Then, I downloaded a couple of movies from Amazon Prime Video. The Wing downloaded a 2.91GB video in 21.16s. Meanwhile, the TCL 10 5G UW took 17.95s to download a 1.83GB movie.

Even the lowest numbers here are no slowpokes. Downloading large files in a pinch is literally the dream that 5G has been trying to sell us since it was first introduced, and today, in 2020, it's kind of reality. So let's talk about the practical and real-world implications of how this super-fast 5G could benefit your life and in what ways it cant.

5G in the real world verdict

Once we left the tightly packed mmWave 5G network, we were knocked back down to LTE speeds. In Downtown Miami, that was around 70 Mbps down and around 45Mbps up on the best runs. Funny enough, when the signal cluster showed "5G", speeds were slower than on LTE - 25 Mbps (or lower) down and 22 Mbps (or lower) up.

It's entirely possible that Verizon was still transitioning its 5G network on when I went down to run these tests, but customers seeing slower speeds when their phone shows "5G" isn't a good first impression.

The Miami area has a dense population. It's flat and spans a large area, so capacity can be difficult to catch up with around here. There are certainly other cities with better performing networks, or perhaps the fact that we went to the densest area of Miami didn't help the LTE/4G speeds.

We love the idea that you can get last-minute internet within Miami International Airport and surf at Gigabit speeds while waiting to board your flight or while waiting at a public transit station before transferring to the Metro Mover. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely limited travel opportunities, and so we can't really reap the 5G benefits in these cases, but that's a whole different story.

But to sum up, it appears 5G mmWave technology is destined to only benefit major metropolitan areas or high-traffic tourist traps. Break-neck internet speeds for mobile devices are not only costly but also impractical in the long-run. It takes a lot of groundwork and infrastructure to build out a network with such high speeds, and the range is only good when you're outdoors or in large, open buildings such as airport terminals, within line-of-sight of the network tower/node. Not only that, but phones that support 5G UW require more internal space to fit the extra radio antennas.

Lowband and midband 5G is already in the works across all major US carriers. As mid-band LTE spectrum is repurposed for midband 5G, we'll begin to see the real benefits of 5G over the next few years in the form of lower latency, higher capacity, and faster internet throughput.

Realistically, those speeds will be well under 1Gbps (down). In its current state, mmWave 5G is the carrier's flex to impress its customers and investors with blazing-fast speeds that over 90% of its subscribers might realistically never be able to benefit from.

The first question you might ask is: Should I get a 5G phone in 2020? I will say only if your budget allows and only if you understand that the decision might not benefit you in the same ways that carriers have been hyping. Otherwise, if you're lucky enough to live or work in these areas blanketed with mmWave or high capacity midband 5G, go for it!