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Wireless Networking Network United States Technology

5G In US Averages 51Mbps While Other Countries Hit Hundreds of Megabits (arstechnica.com) 102

Posted by BeauHD from the lagging-behind dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Average 5G download speeds in the U.S. are 50.9Mbps, a nice step up from average 4G speeds but far behind several countries where 5G speeds are in the 200Mbps to 400Mbps range. These statistics were reported today by OpenSignal, which presented average 5G speeds in 12 countries based on user-initiated speed tests conducted between May 16 and August 14. The U.S. came in last of the 12 countries in 5G speeds, with 10 of the 11 other countries posting 5G speeds that at least doubled those of the U.S. The U.S.'s average 5G speed is 1.8 times higher than the country's average 4G download speed of 28.9Mbps. User tests in neighboring Canada produced a 4G average of 59.4Mbps and a 5G average of 178.1Mbps. Taiwan and Australia both produced 5G averages above 200Mbps, while South Korea and Saudi Arabia produced the highest 5G speeds at 312.7Mbps and 414.2Mbps, respectively.

In the U.S., average download speeds for users who accessed 5G at least some of the time was 33.4Mbps -- that figure includes both their 4G and 5G experiences. This was the second lowest of the 12 countries surveyed by OpenSignal, with the highest speeds coming in Saudi Arabia (144.5Mbps) and Canada (90.4Mbps). The U.S. fared better in 5G availability, the percentage of time in which users are connected to 5G; the U.S. figure in that statistic is 19.3 percent, fifth best, with Saudi Arabia placing first at 34.4 percent and the UK placing last at 4.5 percent. OpenSignal says it collects "billions of measurements daily from over 100 million devices globally."
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5G In US Averages 51Mbps While Other Countries Hit Hundreds of Megabits More

5G In US Averages 51Mbps While Other Countries Hit Hundreds of Megabits

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  • Welcome to the USA (Score:4, Insightful)

    by C3ntaur ( 642283 ) <panystrom@gmai l . c om> on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @05:18PM (#60444423) Journal
    Where deregulation, false advertising, and crime are the new normal. Buyer beware: you will get screwed.

  • Can't blame this on Obama.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Can't blame this on Obama.

      Trust me, he'll find a way. It's one of the few things his brain actually spends energy on. KFC power!

    • No, it's actually Clinton who's '96 Telecommuncations act deregualated the industry that lead to this. ... Like Clintons removal of glass steagall act lead to the 2008 banking collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      And Clintons NAFTA lead to millions of jobs stampeeding to Mexico. Ross Perot was absolutely correct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
      And Clinton's (with Biden co-author) 1994 Omnibus Crime bill threw millions of US Citizens in prison for non-violent crimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wi [wikipedia.org]

  • Rural (Score:3)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @05:26PM (#60444467) Journal

    USA has a lot of rural space. This changes our profile in two ways. First, it's more expensive to wire rural areas because it's more wiring and amplifiers per household hooked up.

    This would typically mean that cities should have cheaper bandwidth, but thanks to our Electoral College system, the cities are subsiding rural areas to "spread the slowness" more evenly.

    We should probably look at Australia and Russia for comparable countries to see how they allocate resources.

    • Totally, we should just elect CA and NY people for everything. After all, things are FANTASTIC there.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        No, we just Suck Different. [wikipedia.org]

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Cyberax ( 705495 )

        Totally, we should just elect CA and NY people for everything. After all, things are FANTASTIC there.

        They aren't fantastic, but they are hell of a lot better than in Missouri or West Virginia.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Trongy ( 64652 )

        If you look at Australia you will find that the 5G is still being rolled out. It's only in selected areas of the large cities and in some regional towns. There are rural areas of Australia that don't have 4G coverage, only 3G.

        The current statistics reflect the fact that most people don't yet have 5G capable phones so there's plenty of capacity for the few who do. Wait a year or two until the 5G networks are operating at capacity and it will look more like 4G does today.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zuriel ( 1760072 )
      Australia allocated a ton of money to building a new copper based network in 2020 that aimed to deliver 25 megabits, so maybe don't look at Australia.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dryeo ( 100693 )

      What about Canada?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tflf ( 4410717 )

        Same issue as the USA, Russia and Australia - a very big country with lots of empty space.
        Limited 5g rollout so far, and strictly urban.

        Rural wireless is a crap shoot, but, the farther you are from a big urban area, the more likely your wireless service sucks.

        The biggest downside to wireless in Canada: even in urban areas, we usually pay more, and get less, than south of the 49th.

  • A movie is going to play the at same speed if it downloads in 20 seconds or 5 minutes. How does the extra speed help me?
    If I need to do a >1GB system upgrade, I'm not going to use up all my AT&T allotted download for for the month. I'm going to do that over wifi at home or work.

    • Re:This is useful because? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @05:47PM (#60444593) Journal

      A movie is going to play the at same speed if it downloads in 20 seconds or 5 minutes. How does the extra speed help me?

      Oh well that's simple, you're helping the CEOs^H^H^H^Heconomy flourish by either paying for a bigger dataplan or paying all those overage fees when you exceed your dataplan by 2,3,10 times it's size.</sarcasm>

      Real answer: it's NOT. It's an solution looking for a problem, and they'll create a problem for it to solve if they must, because MONEY.
      I think this whole 5G thing is a massive scam. I've heard all the lame arguments for it and I'm not convinced.

    • When web page X needs to download 35MB of random JavaScript libraries from 14 different domains, the faster speed does come into play.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ebonum ( 830686 )

        What about latency to 14 servers spread all over the place? You have 30 hops to each one. Making the last hop faster doesn't speed up the other 29. You might not even speed up the latency on the last hop, but you will have more bandwidth.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ewhac ( 5844 )
      Clearly, you live in some wonderful parallel universe where COVID-19 is not a problem, and you get to go in to work at an office, and your children attend school in person. Clearly, you have not tried to repo sync the whole of AOSP over a 30Mbit (on a good day) DSL link as part of your work, or visit various Jira pages, each of which slurps down several megabytes of JavaScript. Clearly, you have not had to deal with two or more Zoom streams (online school, work meetings), while Windows 10 suddenly decides

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by green1 ( 322787 )

      Simple, on 4G it would take me 26 minutes to use up my monthly data cap, whereas on 5G I can do it in 4 seconds.

      I haven't heard a single person in the past 5 years or so wish for faster cell phone speeds, they surpassed most wired connections a long time ago. What people are screaming for is higher data caps, but the cell providers also sell wired broadband and are afraid if the cellular data caps became reasonable that people would stop paying for home internet as well as their cell phones.

  • Just think of how much longer your data-volume-allowance-until-throttling lasts this way!
  • So the US manufacturers should buy equipment from people who actually know how to build competitive stuff (i.e. Huawei), instead of playing protectionism for dinosaur companies.
    • Yeah sure. Why should we care if they're spying on any and all communications that pass through their equipment? It's not like it's a matter of national security or anything.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Cyberax ( 705495 )

        Yeah sure. Why should we care if they're spying on any and all communications that pass through their equipment? It's not like it's a matter of national security or anything.

        So far the US has not discovered any backdoors in the source code of Huawei. But it's not like the voice communication infrastructure is secure, it's pretty much a swiss cheese right now.

        • YET. They haven't found any, YET. Doesn't mean they're not lulling everyone into a false sense of security, meanwhile some future update is compromised. Or maybe they're outsmarting us and it's already compromised, just no one has seen through it yet.

  • 5G covers a wide range of bands (Score:5, Informative)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @05:35PM (#60444519)
    It's not strictly more speed = better. There's a tradeoff between speed and range.
    • The U.S. carriers are re-using a lot of their lower bands (600-700 MHz) for 5G [phonearena.com]. These won't provide speeds much faster than 4G, but will cover a much larger range than 5G at higher frequencies.
    • Most of the rest of the world is concentrating on the 1.7 - 2.5 GHz band. In the U.S., only Sprint had a 5G band in this range (which T-Mobile is now repurposing for their 5G). Faster speeds, but shorter range. From personal experience, I can tell you that Sprint's 2.5 GHz 4G signal was really nice when I was close to the tower, but became marginal at my home about a mile from the tower. Some days it would work, some days it wouldn't. (And then Google rolled out an Android update which took away my ability to selectively disable LTE bands and I was unable to test this anymore.)
    • The highest speeds are at the 24-30 GHz band. They offer the blazing fast speeds you read about when the first Verizon and AT&T 5G towers were rolled out. But you also have to be standing practically within the shadow of the tower to get those speeds.

  • Hey, wait a sec (Score:5, Funny)

    by Krishnoid ( 984597 ) on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @05:36PM (#60444529) Journal

    So *faster* 5G speeds correlates to *less* COVID-19? Who would have thought it.

  • I get up to 1GB of data for $14 a month.

    My current phone doesn't have 5G as far as I know.

    What it does have is pretty good WIFI.

    I am mostly at home, so I just turned off the cell data service on my phone unless I have a need to (shudder) actually leave my house and need to use data (hint, I don't.)

    51Mb/s seems pretty good, I'd like to see some comparisons by carrier and location in a "study" so you could determine if rural or citified users are seeing different speeds.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      I get better than that anywhere inside Greater London on 4G, and I think that's terrible for 4G (which can hit 1Gb/s if deployed correctly).

  • 5G is here and...why exactly? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by prisoner-of-enigma ( 535770 ) on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @05:37PM (#60444541) Homepage

    I keep seeing all this push for 5G, yet for the life of me I can't figure out why...other than to pad the wallets of telcos.

    My 4G LTE OnePlus 7 Pro get 35Mbit/s-40Mbit/s on T-Mobile right now. Ping time is 25ms-30ms, 10ms jitter, zero packet loss. I'm not sending multi-gigabyte files wireless to anyone, nor am I receiving any. While I could stream 4K videos, why would I want to do that on a screen so small it doesn't matter? Gaming doesn't require massive bandwidth, being far more dependent on latency (aka "ping time). Replacement for wired Internet? Good luck with that given data caps and the inevitable wireless congestion widespread adoption would result in. I've heard VR will be the 5G killer app but that's so niche it can't be a realistic consideration for pushing 5G. So where does this fascination come from higher and higher max bandwidth speeds? Some kind of wireless dick measuring contest? Who cares?

    Keep in mind full 5G deployments are fantastically expensive, requiring new wireless gear, new backhauls, new phones with new chipsets...the list goes on and on. Further, achieving the speeds required to make 5G a meaningful upgrade will be like finding a unicorn eating four-leafed clover having just won the lottery. More typically, 5G might give you a speed bump over 4G LTE you'll only detect if you run SpeedTest.Net constantly. Any fool who creates some bizarre app that requires 100Mbit/s-200Mbit/s bandwidth to function will find such a paucity of customers as to go out of business almost immediately.

    The reality is, most people are either at home -- with good WiFi -- or at work -- also with good WiFi. In each case, you're likely to have more bandwidth through WiFi than 5G, with the added bonus of no data caps or dodgy coverage. There's no application for a couple hundred megabits of bandwidth while you're driving or walking. So, please, tell me again why anyone cares at all who has the highest 5G speeds? This a technology in search of a problem to solve, not the other way around.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xlsior ( 524145 )
      Keep in mind, 4G/5G isn't just used by cellphones. It can it also used by mobile hotspots to provide internet to desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and other wifi-enabled devices. Especially in rural areas, wired options can be in short supply.

      • It can it also used by mobile hotspots to provide internet to desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and other wifi-enabled devices.

        Provided you have coverage. And not just coverage but excellent wireless conditions, as the higher speeds from mmWave band are blocked by trivial, everyday things. It's effectively line-of-sight.

        Especially in rural areas, wired options can be in short supply.

        If wired options are in short supply, what makes you think a telco is going to drag a high-speed fiber line out to said rural area to service said 5G tower? If they're already not servicing the area, they're not going to suddenly start servicing it just because 5G became a thing. You're better off with something

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nagora ( 177841 )

      I keep seeing all this push for 5G, yet for the life of me I can't figure out why...other than to pad the wallets of telcos.

      So, you're saying that you understand the situation perfectly, then?

  • In Canada their 5G speeds are clearly faster because their population is not nearly as dense as the US so there are fewer users sharing the bandwidth of each cell tower, while Taiwan obviously benefits from having a much higher population density than the US so it's easier to have complete coverage of the country.

  • I remember getting 50+ mbit on my shiny new 4G phone, both in Downtown Chicago and in a nearby national park.

    What happened?

  • I'm by no means an expert on the topic. But I watched a video talking about 5g and speeds.

    They made mention that it could be used as high speed or long range. That more urban areas were likely to have more "fast" towers if spotty. Could this be an issue of american carriers preferring coverage to raw speed?

    I need to read TFA, my response is based on on the summary and a few comments. So maybe this is a moot point, but we should make sure we are comparing apples to apples.

  • Thank you Bill Clinton (Score:3)

    by sdinfoserv ( 1793266 ) on Wednesday August 26, 2020 @07:03PM (#60444865)
    Just another stab in the back of "the people" by Billy.... The Telecommuncations Act of 1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
    deregulated Telecommunications industry leaving us with few/no choices and higher bills. Trumps appointment of Ajit Pai is the final nail on the coffin of our access to affordable communcations. There is no difference between Dems and Repubs, they both serve corporate masters. Till we get money out of politics, this won't change.

  • When EU went cellular, mobile phones were promiscuous and carriers competed on network speed. Orange seemed 2X faster on my iPhone. No contractual lockdown and lock-in you were free to SIM swap into any carrier.

    Redux 5G where competition in EU out performs CAPITALISM in USA which is steadily synonymous with monopoly - otherwise known as lobbying.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 1s44c ( 552956 )

      The way I see it the US and Europe both believe in freedom, but with one difference.

      The US believes every person, group, corporation, and government entity should be free to do whatever they please.

      Europe believes every person, group, corporation, and government entity should be free to do whatever they please but they are not free to limit the freedom of others.

      The US setup degrades to the biggest bribe, the biggest gun, or the greatest application of power wins any given dispute. The effect is more extrem

  • I just did a test on 4G in Australian (Sydney), and get 75 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload. I really struggle to understand the niche 5G is trying to fill. The existing 4G is more than enough to stream HD video in realtime. What is 5G giving that is really needed (other than a new marketing term)?

  • Canada has faster 4G than USA's 5G
    The only country USA can beat is the one where the 5G towers get burnt down by retards

  • o. 1.

  • I just got 116Mbps down. In locations with a better signal I get 224Mbps down. I have a fairly modern mobile but it doesn't do 5G. I'm in Europe.

    If the US would stop thinking of shared infrastructure as Marxism perhaps they could get better infrastructure and catch up on bandwidth.

  • I just tested LTE on my iPhone XS with 3/4 bars and got 156Mbit/s with a 25ms ping and 4.2ms jitter.

    Seems pretty fast to me, but 5G is supposed to be even faster.

  • It's about the total number of connected devices and total throughput. 99% of people don't need more than a fraction of cable speed on mobile devices. Even Netflix doesn't use that much actual speed in megabits and that's one of the few things that actually uses a lot of bandwidth in the world of mobile. The US has pretty shitty signal strength because it's a low population density nation for it's technology level, so you will mostly never have the fastest internet like a nation with high population densit
  • and that comes through a cable.

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