Is it just me or is 5G strictly worse than LTE?

Having the 5G logo on your phone doesnt necessarily mean your phone is speaking 5G. It's...complicated.

- Most US operators do not have ubiquitous 5G radio coverage, so, they do what is called 5G NSA where your traffic ultimately ends up veing processed by the 4G core infrastructure that they have. Which is already overloaded and a bit creaky.

- Some operators can do real 5G, "5G SA", where the whole flow end to end runs on 5G infrastructure, but whether this is faster than LTE or not depends on the spectrum band in use. Verizon have some high bandwidth spectrum, but it doesnt propagate as well as lower (and slower) frequencies like what Tmo has. But if you expect to get those blazing multi gig speeds, you really have to be on that high bandwidth stuff. For most people, most of the time, they wont, so they wont see much improvement over LTE.

- I assert that it is dawning on operators that consumers are not interested in paying $10 extra per month for 5G. This is a bit of a problem when those same operators spent or borrowed billions to obtain the spectrum in the first place. Did I mention that the era of cheap money is now over and those debt payments are due?

- Telcos desperately need a killer app or use case that drives 5G adoption. They havent got one. And remember, the app must be one that telcos can monetize. They still have scars from their failure to capture the value of smartphone applications in the LTE era.

OK, I will bite.

Comparing 5G vs 4G as Technology is completely different to 5G vs 4G in real world implementation. That is a bit like asking if Core i9 is faster than Core i7 without knowing the clock speed, core count, cache and power budget. Or for Software developers comparing Python vs Ruby without knowing the code and VM, JIT or not

Most 5G network around the world are deployed in higher frequency spectrum. Hence the receiving Bar ( signal quality ) will generally be lowered until they are deployed in sub 1Ghz Band. Refarming frequency from 4G ( or 2G and 3G ) to 5G takes time, MNOs using Ericsson could use Dynamic Spectrum Sharing ( 4G and 5G inside the same Spectrum ) for faster 5G Rollout. But it has its own set of problems.

Until more users switch to 5G capable smartphone, and MNOs work their way to switch to 5G and especially 5G NR SA ( Stand Alone 5G without relaying on 4G Network Back End ). The full potential and advantage of 5G won't be noticeable if not, as in your case even worst than 4G.

Before anyone ask why switch to 5G then if it isn't better now. Well it really is a Chicken and Egg problem. But one way or another MNOs would like ( force ) you to switch to 5G as 5G offers better Network cost efficiency and much higher capacity.

In my day to day, 5G uses more battery, has similar speeds to LTE, and is less reliable than LTE... I just go into settings and turn off 5G.

Occasionally I'm at the airport (or someplace with the "real" wideband 5G) and I want to download a movie quickly. At that point I turn on 5G and get 2 Gbit down, which is convenient!

It wouldn't be so bad if phones were better at switching to the best available signal, they they could use the efficient 5G connection when it's available, but fall back to 4G when the 5G is blocked by a building or something (which I gather is more common due to the high frequencies used in 5G). But they seem to insist on connecting to a crappy 5G signal even if an excellent 4G signal is available. Same with 3G, which is often fine for many tasks.

One of the reasons 5G seems worse is because most implementations are NSA (non-standalone) right now. As others have mentioned, this means you're using the LTE network for control/signaling and 5G just for data traffic. 5G SA improves latency because it ditches the LTE signaling but it's not available everywhere on most operators yet. Verizon and AT&T are just starting to implement it. T-Mobile US has been ahead of the curve in offering 5G SA nationally for a bit now.

However, probably the most important reason 5G performance can appear worse is because NSA works via a technology called ENDC - EUTRAN New Radio Dual Connectivity. This enables your device to receive LTE from one cell site and 5G from another. LTE being there to carry the control/signaling as previously mentioned as well as improve speeds by combining LTE and 5G channels.

When you're receiving 5G from one site and LTE from another. Depending on your device and your network operators settings, more of that traffic will flow over either LTE or 5G. If your 5G channel conditions are poor (say 5G is coming from a far away site but you're also on a closer, LTE-only site), but your device is still preferring to send data mainly over the 5G leg of the connection, you could potentially see worse performance than you would on LTE alone.

LTE Advanced (LTE+) is the sweet spot, they have nearly all the bells and whistles of 5G like CA, MIMO, etc. 5G is over-engineered, it's more like LTE advanced with new frequency, beamforming and some new channel coding while consuming much, much more power both on your cell-phone and cell-towers. The speed and latency benifits are almost negligible because the metrics advertised by telecom industry are measured only between the SA 5G devices and 5G towers, in reality the latency and bandwidth are deciede by the hops all the way to the IDC (unless the so-called "edge-computing" is a thing yet they aren't), so the 5G promises may never happen.

This combined US/EU boyccott of questionable but cheap suppliers like Huawei makes the cost of 5G not worth it.

It's not strictly worse than LTE, but it's not quite just you. A lot of it will depend on a bunch of factors.

If you're in an area with mid-band 5G (5G UC on T-Mobile USA, 5G UW on Verizon, 5G+ on AT&T), 5G will provide a meaningfully better experience most of the time. TDD (time-divided rather than frequency divided) 5G on mid-band spectrum is seeing great results. T-Mobile's 5G network is averaging 217Mbps (including both their low-band and mid-band networks, but it shows how much mid-band 5G can do).

If you're in an area with low-band 5G, it's complicated. If you're on Verizon, they're using DSS (dynamic spectrum sharing) to use the same spectrum for both LTE and 5G. This means that the network is constantly context switching between LTE and 5G and it provides pretty crappy service. If you're on T-Mobile, their low-band 5G network is using new spectrum and does often offer some moderate advantages. Another complication is that you might be sharing that 5G with all the heavier users while an LTE channel is less used. You could also be connecting to a tower farther away to get a 5G signal.

It's probably not that it's higher frequencies since you're probably in an area where it's using similar frequencies. I'd say that this is more likely carrier-related than 5G related.

Depends which flavor of 5G you are talking about. mmWave is still terrible unless you are right next to a cell. Midband is slower, but a huge improvement over LTE, and uses adjacent bands in many cases.

Verizon and ATT pursued a mmWave first buildout, and now they are catching up on midband. That’s why the C-band issue was so huge last year for them. Unique in the US, T-Mobile did midband-first (it was the point of the Sprint merger —- to get Sprint’s frequency licenses that were good for midband), and they have the most useful 5G network, mostly because of availability.

My iPhone will say “5GE” in some areas.

My iPhone is physically incapable of using 5G. It has no 5G antenna. AT&T just makes it say 5G anyway. They use this to “advertise that 5G is available in that area” or some other weird lie. It’s not 5G for me, and I honestly doubt it’s 5G for others either

Completely anecdotally, the internet in these “5GE” areas is usually worse. In fact, nearly everywhere I go anymore my cell service is atrocious now. I have to actually seek out WiFi networks to get usable speeds sometimes. My cellular speeds have noticeably tanked in the past 2 years or so. I used to get like 50mbps sometimes when doing a speed test. Now I usually get ~1mbps at restaurants, or less.

Its been a clear upgrade for me. I am on T-Mobile and in my apartment i see around 200-300mbps and across Seattle metro area i hit 200mbps consistently.

T-mobile has better coverage here compared to ATT and Verizon because of Mid-band spectrum they got with sprint merger. I think other 2 are in process deploying more mid band spectrum and may be that will improve it in future.

In Seattle I see 5G UC (Marketing term for their MidBand Spectrum) for TMobile pretty much everywhere.

I use 5G home broadband because I live in an old building with rusty DOCSIS 2 cables (and also because there was a risk of being sent to quarantine camp in recent years). I get a very stable 200mbit connection and can ping Google with 5-7ms latency.

Note that I live in one of the most busy parts of Hong Kong so YMMV elsewhere. In case anyone's interested, I'm using SmarTone which is the only provider in HK offering unlimited full speed 5G

Depends where you are, for me in the center of Hong Kong, with a Huawei phone, it's a net improvement, it's way way faster. I even use it instead of wifi on my phone because my router slows down with distance while 5G stays fast in every room.

It consumes more battery so when I need to save I go back to 4G and I notice the slog.

Maybe your phone doesnt have a fast chip, your city isn't dense enough to have budget for antennas, or the providers doesnt want to give you 100Mbps... I was telling a friend recently how much of a miracle the internet speed on phones were these days, to tell you how 5G is positive here. It's not even that expensive.

In case it's relative and you expected much more, here is a speedtest from my phone, middle of Central HK, 40th floor inside my toilets, where I often browse HN from: https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/a/9021015738

I have a Pixel 6A on T-Mobile. I keep 5G turned off because it's usually slower and flakier than LTE, visibly chews through the battery (a percentage point every couple of minutes), and heats up the phone.

Most providers have optimized their 5G service for dense urban environments where you have direct line-of-sight (meaning no walls or even foliage) to a nearby transmitter. The idea is to improve the experience in major cities and at event centers. T-Mobile is the only provider I'm aware of that has optimized for higher performance when you're not next to a tower. They operate a long-range 5G network that is a direct upgrade from their long-range LTE service.

It can be a factor of infrastructure as well.

When 4G first started I noticed really fast 4G service at 2am in the morning, but super slow during the day.

Most of the cells I was connecting to were in the city.

Over time as they built out the 4G infrastructure it got better, but for well over a year if you were at work and struggling to get mobile bandwidth then a switch to 3G was almost always significantly faster, double upside because everyone wanted to be on 4G and deserted the 3G bands, so no bottlenecks.

I feel it heavily depends on the modem. I used to have a Pixel 5a, which has an SoC (Snapdragon 765G) that was released during the late stages of the transition from LTE to 5G. On that phone, 5G was a terrible experience and my data wouldn't work half the time when I was outside. I switched to a Galaxy Z Flip 4 a few months ago, and 5G is just fine for me since then (i.e. I don't notice a difference compared to LTE). Same carrier, same locations.

I wish I could get a 2G phone. 3G I'd settle for. All I want is email, Maps, Uber and a Camera. Everything else is just addicting time wasting behavior. I love when my plan runs out of fast data and puts me on that throttled level.

Fantastic here, but heavily area dependent, low-latency and I often see speeds above 250Mbps.

20Mbps is not enough for a phone I use for tethering. 5G home internet is a thing here now too (Australia), and in a lot of cases beats the alternative.

In the UK it seems a clear upgrade. I can be sitting on a train downloading Netflix shows between stops before we go underground. Speed tests often higher than I get at home over VDSL. Couldn't do that on 4G.

> the higher frequencies used for 5G don't go as far or penetrate as effectively.

Not true. 3G & 4G bands are being refarmed to 5G, I am seeing freqs as low as 700 mhz being used around here, so they'll penetrate far and wide.

That said, the presence of a 5G icon on your phone doesn't mean you're actually using 5G, that's very cheeky from operators.

The really meaty 5G band here in UK is N78, 3500mhz, some operators got big chunks of those, for example Three UK has 100mhz of that, contiguous, and people often see 1Gbps+ downloads. I found this frequency does a reasonable job and inrural areas, with high gain antennas, you can still receive it miles away.

mmWave bands - not currently in use in Europe, will indeed be only useful in small (and crowded) places like stadiums, shopping centers, etc. Of course, they could install them on top of many street lights or telegraf poles, then they will become much more useful, in reach of most of us - basically very high speed, low latency "broadband", wireless.

5G is better than 4G in India. Obviously, there are signal issues in remote parts and it isn't available in all the towns. I get 1000Mbps in my home and that to for free at the moment. Thanks to Jio. I have a 200 Mbps fiber connection as well. When I was on LTE I used to switch to WiFi at home but on 5G I don't feel the need to switch.

I was skeptical about the utility of 5G until I downloaded the whole of the Witcher 3 onto my Steam Deck through my phone at 200mbps while on holiday. To be honest I’m still somewhat skeptical, and maybe I should have left the Steam Deck at home instead of taking it on holiday, but I was very aware in that moment that I was living in the future.

Are you using T-mobile or another provider that uses them?

My 5G connection is trash, but I just switched up Google Fi, which is using T-Mobile's network.

Inside my apartment pictures on websites are loading like it's the early 2000's again.

I'm in a major city, I thought that would help.

> I feel like signal is lower in general, and I run into a lot more cases where connections seem to hang entirely.

Exactly my use case.

I recently had to buy a new phone (broken mine) which has support for 5G. Thought that was worth a shot and enabled it on my SIM. I have now disabled it completely in Android and use 4G all the time, which works perfectly fine. I'm not downloading anything from the phone anyway and the most stress I put on its network is streaming music occasionally.

On tmobile, in the US, it’s definitely worse. I usually leave the cell settings to LTE on my iPhone. Occasionally, I’ll switch to 5G Auto. When I get the “uc” symbol next to the 5G, it’s often faster, but not always. I’d say I have a 30% hit rate on 5G where the speed is noticeably better. But as others have said, often I can’t get a web page to loaf even with the phone reporting full signal strength.

Try using Cloudflare warp. If it makes a significant difference then you know the problem is traffic shaping.

Don’t use fast.com on cellular as it’ll often get throttled.

Related to this, does 3G just not work anymore?

I’m in Ontario, Canada and whenever my phone loses LTE and shows full bars 3G, the internet doesn’t work at all.

For me I don't really need 5G at all as 4G already fast enough. I did not realize my phone was actually 5G until noticed the battery could barely make the day.

So I looked the battery statistics, and it seemed the radio ate lots of battery. It turned out that my mobile provider turned on 5G silently for me. So I forced the phone to connect to 4G or below and everything returned to where it was.

As the shift up in frequency happens to chase bandwidth, the penetration through structures and things like foliage, drops off a cliff.

In my experience "bars" of 5G don't have much correlation with actual (tethered) megabits. In some places it's like broadband speeds, and in some places I've had to explicitly switch back to LTE to get a decent connection even though my phone claimed it had a perfect 5G connection.

I’ve noticed this a lot with Verizon 5G UW (as my iPhone labels it). It will seem as if my entire connection is frozen (no pages load but they don’t error out either). If I turn airplane mode on and back off again 9 times out of 10 I immediately get a usable connection.

I don't have it on my phone but I recently got a home 5g modem and it's excellent - speed and latency are both good and indistinguishable from my old cable internet service. If nothing else, I welcome it as a long-overdue competitor to all the awful ISPs.

5G is so much better than LTE here in Australia, the difference in latency alone is really great.

I turned 5G off on my phone and my data speed literally doubled. So I'm getting better battery life, better signal, better speed, and a bonus of less congestion (I assume, I'm not a networkologist) on the LTE network because of all the phones that default the poor suckers to 5G.

Anyway, I'm not all that thrilled with 5G. But I'm a bit of a luddite, I guess, because I also don't want to live in a world where EVERYTHING is connected. I don't want my car to have an internet connection. I don't want 5G boots. I don't need a 5G rain poncho.

Of course they want to push immature technology if it means billion phones will be set to be in need of upgrades.

We all know high bandwidth and low latency are only required on very specific needs.

We don't play e-sports and play 8k videos on phones.

My experience is the same as yours. If I leave 5G turned on my phone insists on staying connected to a 5G network even when that speed is less than two megabits per second in an area where 4G speeds exceed 50 megabits. It takes it the better part of a minute with no signal to fall back to LTE, which means constant connectivity loss when driving. Every six months or so I turn 5G back on to see if coverage has improved but it never has.

5G only really shines in super crowded situations like sports stadiums and music festivals.

In normal everyday situations 5G just drains more battery and causes more glitches due to the more frequent handoffs.

It's also much faster than 4G, of course, but it's quite rare for me to need speeds above 4G on my cell phone. I'm usually not downloading large files when I'm out and about away from WiFi.

In my experience, there are areas where 5G coverage is much more spotty: the phone in one location has 5G and move it half a foot to the left or right and it’s got 3G. There are other areas where 5G is everywhere. 5Gs speed way faster than 4G in my experience. Although I think a lot of the speed you get is artificially imposed caps by the cell service providers.

I run into the ‘hung connection’ issue all the time with an iPhone 13 Pro on Verizon. It’ll just sit there and never load anything - to get network back I have to toggle airplane mode and force a reconnection. It does seem to be related to 5G - if I disable it entirely in the settings I don’t ever notice it happening.

I always thought of 5G being mostly for the carriers instead of being for the customers. The customers realistically don't gain all that much, but the carriers will be able to scale further. Even more customers will be able use the same service some already used. All the marketing fluff was what it was: marketing fluff.

I turn it off on every new iPhone purchase. Next time I’m in a sports stadium I’ll turn it back on … to check HN, naturally.

Glad I’m not the only one who thinks my cell speeds have gone down.

Maybe the tech needs time to mature? Did the switch happen too early?

5g is like 50 different frequency bands

Whereas 4g was like 1 or 2 frequency bands dictated by your carrier

I agree that the user experience is worse.

shorter length of coverage gives extremely high bandwidth, while a longer range of coverage gives 4g levels of bandwidth or maybe worse

hopefully the chipset gets better, I hope this isnt a fundamental limitation

Also battery life. Was in Florida a few weeks ago staying in a house without wifi but with weak 5G signal. My phone’s battery could barely make it through the day (which never happens to me otherwise). Turning off 5G (i.e., LTE only mode) seemed to help some.

5G download has been the same or worse than 4G, and signal can be much worse indoors/etc. When I get signal, 5G upload is usually better. 5G signal at home is better than 4G was, but I think that's because of more bands/towers, not because 5G is better.

idk. about US in some EU countries it's pretty common to only have LTE+5G sending stations.

I.e. most parts are hand over LTE and only some traffic gets switched over to 5G (e. g. video streams or large downloads).

the reason is simple that:

- backwards compatibility for all the non 5G devices is needed

- for most daily use LTE is enough

- use-cases which really need 5G and are in the normal phone radio network are still rare, the most common probably bring 5G to WiFi router in some cases. But such solutions are often seen as last choice if they is no other solution so mostly in the country side where the 5G/LTE net often isn't grate either (of available at all)

Latency and throughput in London appears to be largely the same.

I was hoping for something in the 20ms range for latency, but it always tests as in the 60ms range. Raw throughput seems largely the same as with LTE (ranging from 40-80mbps)

But if a underwhelming waste of time it seems.

I went from a NetGear M1 4G MR4100 router to a NetGear M2 5G MR6150 router and it is noticeably worse. The router overheats more easily, drops connections, needs to be rebooted.

I don't know if it is the product change or the 5G, but it is really frustrating.

I recently upgraded from an iPhone X to an iPhone 14 Pro on Verizon and did not see any improvement going from LTE to 5G. If anything, the connection became less stable and I decided to disable 5G and it works a lot better!

Looks like we've reached the feature saturation intersection, where the added benefit curve meets the curve of ridiculousness. This happened with razors too, who also coincidentally stopped at 5.

In a busy square in Portugal I got 1.1gbps and at a cafe in Malta I got 750mbps on 5g. Didn't check latency or packetloss etc, just a raw speed test in places I could see it was

My phone still doesn't support 5G. But a coworker is always complaining that when he gets 5G signal, comms work noticeably worse than when 5G signal is not available.

I've definitely seen that any time my phone says 5G UC that there is no connectivity. I have to reboot the phone, and it starts working again. Pixel 6.

Can't tell the difference frankly.

Then again UK doesn't have the sub ghz stuff which I imagine is responsible for most of the handovers/hangs

Depends on the provider and which bands they are using for it. At least on verizon in my area it’s strictly worse

It entirely depends on your carrier: frequencies used, number of antennas, backhaul, sharing w/ 4G, ...

The goal of 5G is to sell equipment at all levels because it has one more G. Mission accomplished!

Locally 3g was the most reliable. I think we're working backwards in accessibility of the network. It seemed just a few years ago, all we needed was a tower every so often, now we have towers and microcells. Is it a capacity issue or have we pushed into a spectrum that is more suited to dense cities rather than less dense towns?

This isn't about your benefit ;)

5G should in the long run be cheaper for telcos to operate.

I have super fast broadband thanks to 5g. It's just little more expensive

Paranoid mode on

If 5G was forced into us so badly, chances are that:

- 4G was bad for the health - 5G allow much finger user tracking capabilities

Other than that, the rest of use cases were BS, as we already know.

More over in my country the telecoms had capped the 4G speed to half its speed and nobody complained.

5G drains the battery way too fast, and 4G is good enough for me.

Welcome to 2023. Just don't ask what's in store for 2033.

It's not just you. I have it disabled most of the time.

It's for sensing

5G is always terrible compared to LTE for me too.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

Yes.