Introduction
If you've been anywhere near the techy parts of the internet for the past few months, you surely have read about 5G this, 5G that, "5G is here", "5G is here, now", all that buzz. It's even being tacked onto the end of phone names left and right, as a way for manufacturers to let you know that they're in the 5G game too.
But what game is this? What's behind the buzzword? Should you take all this talk of revolutionary this and revolutionary that at face value? Or is 5G just the latest way carriers and phone makers have found to milk you of even more of your hard earned cash?
The truth, as always, is complicated and in dire need of contextualization, and it's not as simple as "5G is amazing" or "5G is useless". We're going to take a deep dive to try and give you a fuller picture of what's actually going on, without getting too technical or discussing the nonsense that 5G radio waves caused the current COVID-19 pandemic.
We've come a long way since the days of GSM networks, and the improvements that 5G brings to the table need to be acknowledged. At the same time, downsides do exist, whether it be the fact that 5G isn't actually one thing, or how adding 5G to them has recently made some smartphones more expensive than their predecessors.
Speaking of smartphones, we'll show you 5G speed tests from the Kirin 990 powered Huawei P40 Pro, the Exynos 990 powered Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, and the Snapdragon 865 powered Realme X50 Pro 5G. We consider these to provide an interesting assortment of three different chipset families, and we were curious to see if there would be any differences between them in real world use. Spoiler alert: not all 5G chips are equal.
Then, we'll be talking about 5G phones in general, trying to answer what may turn out to be one of the most important questions of the year: should you buy a 5G phone right now or hold off?
So please join us over the next few pages as we try to separate 5G marketing hype from 5G reality, both for the present moment, as well as the near future.
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.
Performance and speed tests
You may be wondering what to expect from 5G in actual real life use. We were too, so we took the Huawei P40 Pro, the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G, and the Realme X50 Pro 5G for a spin around our neck of the woods to see what's what. We chose these phones because each of them uses a different chipset: the Huawei has the in-house Kirin 990 5G, the Realme uses the Snapdragon 865, and our S20 Ultra is an Exynos 990 model. We were curious to see if we could spot any differences in 5G performance between them, subjective as those perceptions might inevitably be.
Our carrier of choice has an NSA Sub-6 5G network, using 100MHz on band 78, which is around 3500MHz. We're going to show you the screenshots of our speed testing results first, and then discuss the umpteen caveats that apply.
First off, here's what we were able to achieve on the P40 Pro with the Kirin 990 5G:
5G speed tests on the Huawei P40 Pro
Following are the results from the Realme X50 Pro 5G, with its Snapdragon 865 at the helm:
5G speed tests on the Realme X50 Pro 5G
And finally, here's what we got from the Exynos 990-powered Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G:
5G speed tests on the Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G
We also had a Huawei Mate Xs around, and its results are so similar to the P40 Pro's that we felt it would be pointless to include them as well. This, of course, is no surprise, as the Mate Xs uses the exact same Kirin 990 5G chip as the P40 Pro.
Now, in our experience with these phones on 5G, we came to realize that both the Snapdragon 865 and the Exynos 990 seem to be marginally faster overall, on average, than the Kirin 990 5G. Because of varying network conditions and all that, it would've been impossible to do a true objective scientific test, so please understand that this is more a subjective impression than anything else.
Interestingly enough, the Kirin 990 5G makes up for that perceived difference in battery efficiency. The P40 Pro and Realme X50 Pro 5G have very similar battery capacities, but the Huawei phone has better battery life, both when actively using 5G and also when just being connected to the 5G network while using Wi-Fi. There still seems to be a battery penalty to going with a 5G-capable chipset compared to the most efficient SoCs of yesteryear, mind you, but that penalty is lower with the Kirin 990 5G than it is with both the Exynos 990 and the Snapdragon 865. Perhaps it has a lot to do with the fact that the Kirin 990 5G is the only chipset of the three that has the modem fully integrated.
And back to our tests, it's worth noting that compared to 4G, all three phones suffered from an increased attenuation which comes with the territory of the higher band being used. The highest 4G band our carrier uses, like in most of Europe, is band 7, aka 2600MHz. Given that its 5G band is around 3500MHz, the signal is less stable when it passes through walls, glass, and just in general when there are any obstacles between you and the tower. Of course, we're just talking a slight decrease here, things are nowhere near as bad, attenuation-wise, as they are with any mmWave network. This can be mitigated by having a denser tower rollout, which is probably still attainable without huge financial downsides for a carrier.
Let's add some context
Okay, now let's address the fine print, which will be lengthy. First off, we aren't going to be paying much attention to upload speeds, because our carrier still uses 4G for those. Not just that, but the 4G band that handles these uploads is band 20, which happens to be that for which our carrier has the least amount of capacity. There are technical reasons for this which we won't get into, suffice it to say that once uploads will be over 5G, the speeds will increase accordingly. As the situation is right now, the theoretical maximum for uploads in this setup is 75Mbps. With that in mind, the results you see aren't actually bad, some of the time.
For the purposes of having some context, note that when using 4G without carrier aggregation, on the same network, we usually get around 40Mbps downloads. This isn't the best effort sort of result, at 3 AM when the network is practically empty, and in the best possible position, etc, it's just an average speed on an average day at an average time.
On 4G+ (also known as LTE-A or LTE+, or basically 4G with carrier aggregation), we usually get around 80-90Mbps down, again, on average. Peaks hover around 150Mbps, but those are getting harder and harder to find, now that most people do actually have a 4G+ capable handset. If you're curious, note that our carrier aggregates two or three bands (depending on where you are), for a theoretical maximum download of 450Mbps (on paper).
On 5G, the carrier uses 100MHz of bandwidth, which, as things stand right now, on NSA and without any carrier aggregation, should allow for a theoretical maximum download speed of 1.2Gbps. Except that's very much theoretical, like with Wi-Fi "top" speeds.
As you can see from our screenshots above, in real life use, we got over 100Mbps almost every time, while the lower results can be attributed to the 5G rollout still being in a sort of beta testing phase for the carrier, despite what marketing claims may have been made.
Generally, though, unless we were in a spot with bad reception, 200Mbps+ was easily achievable, and 300Mbps+ wasn't out of the ordinary either, with peaks around 450Mbps. Depending on how you want to count, that's at least 2x better than 4G+, and maybe even 3x.
Of course if all things remain the same, then as soon as the 5G network starts crowding with new devices using it, speeds will go down, but that's not necessarily a given for the near future. First off, 5G can simply accommodate more simultaneous connections than 4G, it can better make use of the bandwidth it has, and there's also just a lot more of that bandwidth.
Let's also reiterate that while we're happy with this carrier's current implementation, clearly it still has a lot of kinks to iron out with 5G, and that might make the connections more stable and the speeds faster.
What should you expect?
From our limited experience with 5G NSA, we would expect to get a 2x-3x improvement in download speeds over 4G+. Remember, this is Sub-6 5G (band 78), with 100MHz of bandwidth being used. If your carrier has less bandwidth to allocate to 5G, then obviously both the theoretical maximum speed as well as what you'll see in real life will fall. And if it's more bandwidth, then you can see even better results. And if the network is better optimized than ours, that might contribute to an uptick as well. There are just a lot of variables at work, and that's why it's kind of impossible to simplify this.
In the US, for example, T-Mobile has its "low-band" rollout, using band 71 (a.k.a. 600MHz), and that's great for coverage per tower, but the magenta carrier only has 10 to 25MHz of spectrum to work with (it varies depending on exactly where you are in the country). In the best case scenario with 25MHz being used, the theoretical (emphasis on theoretical) top throughput would be 300Mbps, while if your area only gets 10MHz, then that falls to 120Mbps, or thereabouts. Again, we're talking theoretical maximums here, in the real world the top speeds you'll get will probably hover around one third of that, while the average speeds will be even lower of course.
If you spread this 600MHz "low-band" 5G through any area that isn't rural or barely inhabited, then you get even less from it in real life testing, because it's much easier for a tower that covers more ground (like these are) to reach the point where it just can't serve more people well - because its catchment area is bigger than any "mid-band" rollout. So while this could be a great strategy to use to bring broadband connectivity to rural parts of America, it's not a great idea in cities of any significant population density.
And then there's latency. The improvements here should theoretically be bigger, but that depends a lot on what your carrier uses for communication between its 4G towers, whether it's fiber to the tower or something else like microwave or satellite links. The latter introduce way more latency.
The best ping we've seen so far is around 15ms, which is good but not jaw-dropping for sure, and it's actually not very far from the best pings we've seen on 4G towers that are connected via fiber. There's a lot more room for improvement here, though, what with low latency being one of the biggest benefits of 5G. While 15-ish ms might be enough for some internet-of-things applications, others could require even less - think robotic surgery that's human-assisted over 5G, or, yes, those self-driving cars again.
Are phones getting a "5G tax"?
You may have seen a lot of new phones coming out lately with 5G built-in, and you may also have realized that the prevailing trend of the past few years, which is flagships getting ever more expensive, seems to have accelerated wildly this year. Even brands that were once associated with value above all else are now offering way less of that than they used to.
What's the connection? It might be 5G, actually. While this isn't a conspiracy theory, it is just a theory - one we've stringed together based on a lot of assumptions, so bear with us but keep in mind that this isn't inside information, it's just what we think makes most sense.
First off, in the Android world every flagship device worth its salt uses the Snapdragon 865 chipset from Qualcomm. There are few exceptions and we'll address them in due course. The 865 doesn't have an integrated modem, so when you buy it, you are required to add the X55 5G modem, also made by Qualcomm. This is jam-packed with new technology, so it's clearly not cheap, adding that 'not-cheap-ness' on top of the 865's price, which is definitely not a bargain either.
But wait, for 5G to actually work you also need RF circuitry and antennas - more of them than for previous Gs, in fact, and many more if you want to support mmWave as well as Sub-6. See where this is going? All of this stuff costs handset makers money, and those costs add up quickly.
There's an indirect issue too. Because the modem isn't built into the chipset, it takes up more space inside the phone. Because you need to have a bunch of antennas everywhere, those need more space than fewer antennas would. This gets us to the rumored (but never officially confirmed) tidbit that Qualcomm is also mandating a specific minimum volume for phones using its top of the line 5G chip, to ensure that all of those components have somewhere to go and aren't close enough to each other to create interference or excessive heat.
So now if you're a phone maker you're basically constrained by all these factors into making a handset that isn't compact. And if it's bigger, then you might as well add a big display, with tiny bezels, to adhere to the other prevailing trend of the recent few years. But wait, it's 2020 now and a high refresh rate is a must have on your spec list, and that isn't free either, from a cost perspective. All of these new connectivity parts, added to the bigger screen, pretty much require larger batteries. No one wants their premier flagship laughed out of the mobile space by having inadequate battery life, so let's add that too. To the final cost, of course.
And this is how we ended up with flagships that are even more expensive than last year.
Yes, Samsung uses its own Exynos chipset in a lot of the world for the S20 line, but that also doesn't have an integrated modem, so most of the considerations above could still reasonably apply to it.
And what about Huawei? Well, its Kirin 990 5G SoC does actually have an integrated modem, and guess what - the P40 Pro and P40 Pro+ are slightly more compact devices than their competitors. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not. The thing is we'll never know for sure, as manufacturers understandably don't want such information to get out in the open.
But this is a very likely possibility. And it would explain why flagship prices have gone out of control. So if you want to, blame Qualcomm. But keep in mind that while its strategy of mandating the 5G modem be used with the Snapdragon 865 may indeed have driven the average flagship's price up (both directly and indirectly), it's also definitely helped make 5G adoption across the world faster than 4G's was.
There are more and more phones with 5G now, which means carriers are scrambling to add more and more 5G towers. What took 4G a few years to achieve will take 5G way less. 5G adoption, when looked at on a global scale, has also been massively helped by China's decision to go all-in with it, as it's the home of the three of the biggest carriers in the world.
What about mid-rangers, then? Well, Qualcomm has the Snapdragon 765/765G/768 chipsets for that bracket with 5G actually built-in, only these don't seem to be exceptionally cheap in general, and they also don't have amazing performance either, for the 'premium mid-range' price tier. Don't worry though, for affordable 5G phones are coming, they're just more likely to be powered by something built by MediaTek.
The Taiwanese chip maker's Dimensity series of 5G capable chips haven't made a dent in the market yet, but that could change by the end of the year. They seem to offer very good performance for the price, and that price appears to be low enough to enable cheaper smartphones than those with Qualcomm's 7-series solution, all other specs being the same. Huawei has its Kirin 820 5G too.
One way or another, 5G won't be constrained to the high-end for much longer. Xiaomi sub-brand Redmi even wants all of its devices costing $200 and over to have 5G by next year, and that will be a huge driver of adoption. Which in turn will make carriers strive to put up even more towers, and so on.
So while at the moment 5G may not look important because it's not ubiquitous, its ubiquity may arrive much faster than you could anticipate. It's not a matter of years (plural), it's probably going to be in most places within one year or so from now.
Battery life concerns
Another 5G-related issue might have to do with the battery consumption of those brand spanking new 5G modems, especially the ones that aren't built into the chipset itself. As we noted above, because 5G handsets are just not small by any stretch of the imagination, manufacturers have added bigger batteries in those bodies too. Just by looking at the sheer mAh numbers, this trend is easy to spot.
However, you shouldn't let those numbers guide you astray in thinking that you'd get the best battery life in history with these devices, given their ample capacities. Not really. As with any new "G", the fifth one also seems to currently consume more power than its fourth-gen predecessor. Whether that's because there's more RF circuitry involved, or if it's just because the modem is external to the chipset, we can't tell, but this does seem to apply even to using a 5G device on a 4G network.
The bigger and higher refresh rate screens clearly don't help here either, and when you add those on top of the 5G pie, you have flagship phones with huge batteries but just decent - or even average - battery life. This is the way things are, at least for now. This is true for Exynos-powered 5G Samsungs as well as Snapdragon 865 handsets (although slightly less for the latter), and yet interestingly battery life is not as much of an issue for Kirin 990 powered phones. We're betting that has something to do with the fact that this SoC has an integrated 5G modem, but this is one of those things we'll never be able to definitively prove.
The point here is that if you're searching for a 5G phone to buy, you shouldn't just compare its battery capacity to your current device's and draw conclusions from there. Make sure you compare objective battery life scores, such as the one in our battery test, which is included in all of our reviews. That will give you a much clearer image of what you should expect, so there's less of a chance for disappointment.
So should you pull the trigger?
If you're going to buy a phone, should you make sure it has 5G? It's... complicated. To help, ask yourself this - how long will you be keeping that phone?
If your country has no intention of allowing 5G to happen within the next year and you intend to switch to something else in a year, then having a 5G phone is irrelevant to you right now. But polls say that the average person holds onto a smartphone for around 2-3 years, and that's an entirely different timeline to consider. Save for a few holdouts, 5G will probably be everywhere in 3 years.
But even that may not matter. What if you're not an early adopter and you simply don't care about new technologies when they're still not mature or you don't want to pay for the new fad? Well in this case look at the speeds your carrier is currently able to provide on 4G. If those are actually good enough for your use cases, then it makes no sense for you to go with a 5G device now. But if they're not satisfactory, then maybe you would benefit from a 2x-3x increase in those speeds, which 5G can probably deliver to you, even Sub-6, even on low(er) bands. That is, unless your carrier has decided to use less spectrum / bandwidth for 5G than it does for 4G, in which case the benefits of jumping to the new technology may have more to do with (possible) coverage than speed.
The numbers aren't as high as marketing people would want them to be, but let's ignore the hype and talk about real world stuff. This all depends on what you use your mobile connection for, and how happy you are with its current performance. If you're not very happy, or not always, if top quality video streams buffer for you more often than not, if downloads are slow, then you probably want to future proof yourself with a 5G phone.
However, if your carrier doesn't already offer 5G, then you'd need to figure out which bands will be used for 5G in your country, and pick your device accordingly. Oh, and also keep in mind that we've seen a lot of early issues with phones from different regions. Basically, some phone makers don't enable 5G for all carriers everywhere, on an unlocked basis, like with 4/3/2G.
This is probably done out of an abundance of caution, but it's annoying nevertheless and this means your best bet to get 5G running is to get the phone straight from your carrier.
It's all quite messy, so it would be understandable if you just ignore all this 5G hype, but don't discount the very real benefits it has to offer just because it's overhyped. By that logic, no one should be using the S20 Ultra's zoom camera for any magnification level - just on the account of the fact that the 100x "Space Zoom" is practically useless. Will 5G offer you 100x your current speed? No, and it will never do that, but so what?
Depending on where you live, 5G may actually consistently give you speeds that are above what some people in the same country get via wired internet connections, and at latencies that while not similar (yet), aren't necessarily very far off. Is that something to just discount off hand? We don't think so. It's important to look past the sheer hype and see things for what they are.
Conclusion
To quote Qualcomm President Cristiano Amon, "5G is here". Well, sort of. Kind of. Ever so slightly. Thing is, though - even if it's not fully "here" now, it will soon be, and it has the potential to make our world even more interconnected than before. That can lead to exciting and probably still unknown new use cases popping up all over once the infrastructure is in place across the globe. Not just self-driving cars talking to each other in real time, or doctors performing surgeries remotely with the aid of robots, but things we can't even imagine at the moment.
Yes, right now, it's still early days for 5G, but it's coming sooner than you may expect. Coverage is increasing a lot faster than it did back when 4G was nascent, and at this rate most of the world will have some form of Sub-6 5G within a year or so. mmWave is an entirely different beast, though, and given considerations about its cost effectiveness in covering a lot of land area well, it might get relegated to niche uses in a lot of places - like replacing fiber to the home connections, for example. In a lot of countries which currently lack the "last mile" fiber infrastructure, it is probably cheaper to deploy mmWave 5G and give people special high-gain modems to access it than fiddle with cables everywhere.
From our real-word testing we can say that a reasonable conservative estimate of the gains 5G brings in terms of speed is around 2x-3x those of 4G+/LTE-A, but this is thanks to two things working in concert: 5G itself being able to use radio bandwidth in a more efficient way, and also the fact that carriers may simply allocate more bandwidth to 5G, especially with higher Sub-6 bands because those are likely to be less used. This may not always be the case though, especially with lower-band rollouts.
In an apples to apples comparison with the exact same bandwidth, 5G would probably deliver around 30% more, based on the best that 4G+ can currently achieve. So is that enough? It may appear disappointing, but in actual use it very much depends where you are coming from. Does your network of choice do carrier aggregation on 4G, with 256QAM and MIMO? If so, then the number above applies. If not, then the difference will be much higher in the improvements you'll see with 5G. And in the future, carrier aggregation will be a thing for 5G as well, which will enable even better speeds from the same bandwidth.
All that said, if you're happy with 4G, stick with it, at least for now. There is no 5G rush just yet. If, on the other hand, you love living on the bleeding edge, or if the phone you want to get from your carrier already has 5G built in, well then, welcome to the future! It's exciting, even if it may not be everything that the incessant marketing has made it out to be. At least not yet.
Regardless of whether you intend to hop on a 5G network or not, however, there is already a "5G tax" you'll unfortunately have to pay if you jump to a new smartphone - and it may be evident in the price of the product or it may be hidden in the way of shorter battery life.
But like with all new technologies, that 5G premium will be absorbed and will dissolve in the next update cycle of smartphone chipsets, which should come this autumn and effectively be implemented in 2021. Also more and more mid-rangers are going to come out with 5G in the next few months, and they'll be hitting lower and lower price points.
In a time not so far away from now, all these kinks will have been ironed out and 5G will end up being a mere box to be ticked on most spec sheets. Just as it should be. Once it achieves 'default' status, we can hopefully start to see the real innovations pouring in - from apps to new product categories, and who knows what else. Exciting times lie ahead.
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