But my nearest antenna is a block away with pretty good sight lines. If I move my radio even 6ft in the wrong direction my speeds go through the floor. I think the 5G hype was excessive for a technology that only works in very specific circumstances and it’s led to some disappointment.
The push for 5g in general has been a bit of a head scratcher for me. I don't think consumers have been clamoring for multi gigabit wireless en mass. If they're like me, they would prefer consistency and reliability.
Speed is less important when you can use WIFI at home and in many places, which is going to be faster and more reliable. I always suspected something else was pushing the massive investment and marketing of 5g. Maybe cost massive savings on new spectrum leases?
I don't know for sure, but when the I saw a commercial that said 5g would help doctors at a hospital diagnose illness faster (using networked equipment) I was like why the hell would hospitals even want to use 5g?
Ethernet, Fiber, maybe wifi. But 5g?? Craziness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpzF2JOgiwE
Everything this guy talks about can be accomplished by traditional wifi and ethernet.
Also, it may be bold to assume that WiFi as offered is a practical option.
> Speed is less important when you can use WIFI at home and in many places
In my experience 5G provides that consistency: Wifi (outside of my reliable home connection) is often super flaky. With 5G on my phone I find myself connecting to (e.g.) coffee shop Wifi much less often and I tether my laptop to my phone rather than use it.
One street over I get 1000 mbps down/250 mbps up which I am a bit salty about. There is a terrain feature that makes it impossible for me to see that same tower from my house.
This article has a thorough explanation (1)
In most nowadays 5G implementation is the first one, where you get a slight enhanced LTE, as it’s easier to implement, SA, which provide extra features is still not widely used -although it’s changing, and then you have the least adopted one is the mmwave due to its new bands (unlike the sub-6GHz) that require new radio/towers/etc. on a higher frequencies (also higher noise), and also new UE (or user equipment/device), which so far only very limited devices support that. In Canada, we did some cell surveys utilizing robots/drones to map the areas at different altitudes to find the deadzones and coverage, and you can say in most of the results, NSA can have the coverage as the LTE, mmwave in some cases we had not just to maintain a clear line of sight to get any signal, but also we have to be relatively close. So mmwave adoption might still in its early stages, it’s also why so operators went with C-band instead.
(1) https://dgtlinfra.com/5g-standalone-sa/#:~:text=What%20is%20....