What is 5G and why is it kind of bad now?

After a presentation by the president of the Consumer Technology Association, Gary Shapiro, Verizon’s CEO, Hans Vestberg, takes the stage. He wears a simple black T-shirt with an unmistakable red plaid and begins to deliver his main speech. The topic at hand is 5G, something that Vestberg talks about with enthusiasm. The lecture addresses the 5 “coins” of 5G, introduces a professional athlete and highlights how 5G will transform the drone industry.

That was CES 2019. It was also CES 2021. Verizon was not the only one to supply the 5G hype machine; AT&T and T-Mobile have been publicizing their 5G networks for years. Now is the time for the show. With the main phones and many more low-cost devices supporting them, this is the year that a critical mass of phone buyers will finally see for themselves what this whole conversation is about.

Here’s the bad news: if they have heard the hype, they will be disappointed. We promise a fourth industrial revolution with fantastic things like remote surgery and driverless cars. Instead, what we have now is generalized 5G which is about the same speed (or even slower than) 4G and super-fast mmWave 5G in some parts of some large cities with highly limited reach. So, where is the 5G future that we were promised? The truth is that it is happening, but it will materialize more slowly and in less obvious ways than we have been led to believe.

Spectrum wars

To understand the complicated 5G situation in the USA now, you first need to know that there are low, medium and high band frequencies that operators can use. The low band is slower, but offers broad coverage. The high band, often called mmWave, is very fast, but extremely limited in range. The middle band is at an ideal point between the two, with good range and speeds better than LTE.

If you were building a 5G network from scratch, you would probably like a lot of middle band spectrum, right? The problem is that the spectrum is a limited resource. Sascha Segan, leading cell analyst at PCMag and a wealth of 5G knowledge, sums up part of the spectrum problem.

“Our government has not made the right channels available to operators,” he says. “Verizon and AT&T are basically using the remaining advantages and disadvantages of their 4G spectrum … placing the 5G encoding on those remaining bits and bobs so that they can display a 5G icon on the screen. And performance is meaningless. ”

The technology that Verizon and AT&T are using to get 5G coverage across the country is called Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS), which allows 4G and 5G to coexist on the same spectrum. This helps operators to transition from one technology to another, but it comes at a cost. Michael Thelander, president and founder of Signals Research Group, a wireless industry research company, summarizes it this way: “It’s like having that super fast sports car and being stuck on the Santa Monica highway. You cannot experience all the features. “

T-Mobile, on the other hand, does not need to rely on spectrum sharing as much as the other two, thanks to the acquisition of Sprint and its mid-band spectrum. This has given him an advantage in his 5G offerings so far.

However, in early 2022, we are likely to see Verizon and AT&T recover. A middle band spectrum band known as the C band went up for auction in late 2020. And although we don’t know which companies won which blocks of spectrum, we know that these two operators, in particular, spent a lot; bids exceeded $ 80 billion.

What happens next?

Networks may not be firing on all cylinders yet, but more and more mobile devices are ready for them. In fact, by the end of the year, it may be more difficult to find a phone that is not 5G than one that supports technology. The flagship phones from Apple and Samsung not only support 5G in their lines, but are also paving the way for cheaper and midsize devices, thanks to new low-end processors ready for 5G, like the Qualcomm Snapdragon 480.

More people than ever will buy a 5G phone this year – probably not because they really wanted 5G, but because the phone they were going to buy is compatible. The good news is that there is really no downside to buying a 5G phone now, if it’s time to upgrade. The “5G tax” that imposed a higher price on 5G phones in the past two years seems to be disappearing and we did not notice any other disadvantages, such as excessive battery consumption in our tests.

What is the reaction even to, say, someone who bought an iPhone 12 – not for 5G, but why is the new iPhone? “They are frustrated and angry,” says Segan. “With both Verizon and AT&T, because of what I will call technical difficulties, national 5G is usually slower than 4G. So, people are getting these iPhones and finding that they often perform worse than before 5G. ”The“ technical difficulties ”he refers to include DSS in the case of Verizon and the limitations of the narrow 5 MHz band that AT&T uses for its 5G.

This is not great. But some factors will make a difference next year. First, the C band spectrum will start to go online at the end of the year. If you are one of the frustrated owners of an iPhone 12 or Galaxy S21, there is good news: your phone has already been approved to use C band, so if you use Verizon or AT&T, you will see speed improvements when that happens.

Not all 5G phones support C band, however. Those who don’t need a software update to use it, and there’s no guarantee that your phone’s manufacturer will offer one. Cheap 5G models, in particular, may not have a C band upgrade, even if they have the hardware to support it. Phone manufacturers need to request approval from the Federal Communications Commission to enable it and may be less likely to worry about the cost of this step for phones with a shorter life span.

The other factor is something that is likely to happen before the C band becomes available: large meetings. That’s when Segan thinks Verizon’s Ultra Wideband could really shine. “When we are all vaccinated, I think people will be desperate … for all these dense, crowded and communal experiences that we will be missing for a year and a half. And so Verizon must be working on apps and experiences right now like the thing they did at the Super Bowl, or what they talked about doing at Disney World, which you can only do on Ultra Wideband. ”

Again, this will depend on whether your 5G phone supports Gentle 5G – not every 5G phone supports mmWave. The flagships of the iPhone and Samsung mentioned above, and other compatible Verizon models are indicated as “UW”.

Where are our jetpacks?

What about CES lectures, such as remote surgery and autonomous cars? It is also on the way, but it will take longer. Thelander explains: “The first focus of 5G was really a feature called ‘enhanced mobile broadband’ and that is just getting fast data speeds for the consumer on your smartphone. Things like factory automation and the functionality behind it, which was really developed afterwards, then falls behind, from a standardization perspective. ”

Solving the technology is only half the equation. “After defining a certain feature or functionality in a standard, now a supplier needs to go out and build that functionality, then test it and then get the industry to adopt it,” says Thelander. “The technology can be there, the pattern can be there, it can work well, but it has to be implemented and implemented. And you have to have a business case for that. How do you make money from it? All those kinds of things … it takes time. “

Despite networks constantly waving their “mission accomplished 5G” banners in TV commercials last year, 5G is still a work in progress. It will improve, but how quickly it will happen for you depends on several factors: which phone you have and which bands it supports, which network you are on, where you are and what you are doing. It seems clear now that there has never really been a “5G race” – just technological progress as usual, which is often slow, confusing and uneven. This is a little more difficult to sell on a keynote or commercial.