5G

I have recently been extremely frustrated with my phone service. While I agreed at the time that carriers (and Apple for that matter) were over-hyping 5G, I also felt like people were being too harsh in their criticism. Deploying new networks takes time. I even wrote about it here.

I wrote that in early 2021, and we are getting close to 2024 now, and I have to say, 5G has been an enormous disappointment for me. My experience is on Verizon, which is one of the carriers who pushed 5G being a revolution the hardest. When I wrote that, there were only little pockets of good 5G coverage, but when you were in those spots, it felt like sci-fi. I was getting over 2.5 Gb/s (Yes, Gb/s, not Mb/s) on my cellular, which is unbelievable to me still. The problem was you had to be within about 200-300 feet of one of their mmWave towers. Still, I thought at least in high traffic areas, this would be a game changer.

I get season tickets to MLS soccer here locally (Real Salt Lake) and often go to University of Utah Football games. Stadiums are one of the worst places for cell service, and one of the clearest benefits of where mmWave 5G would make a ton of sense in my mind. Well it’s been years, and although I think they have added some towers near the stadiums, I almost never actually get any service. Likewise, other places I used to consistently get the mmWave signal, no longer seem to be working very consistently. A local Taco Bell has an mmWave tower right in the parking lot, and I used to always connect at hyper fast speeds. Now it only connects to it maybe half the time, if that.

I also live in the city, not right down town, but definitely in a very populated area. My work is about a 10 minute drive for me, and yet about 90% of that drive, my phone won’t connect to 5G at all. Just LTE the whole way. More than that, there are spots now where music struggles to stream. In a city. In 2023.

It doesn’t really matter how good 5G could be, if it won’t ever work. I pay more every month for the “faster” service to be on the bleeding edge of connectivity, but I’m not sure what the point is.

The Verge wrote an article this week around the same kind of thing - The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill. It seems investors are also getting impatient about 5G being smoke and mirrors. It’s hard to tell if the US Carriers just completely botched this rollout, or if the technology from Chinese chip makers really killed the rollout for the US, or if 5G was just an overhyped technology that is actually worse in far more ways than we were lead to believe, but either way it’s incredibly frustrating.