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Wireless Networking Communications The Internet United States

5G Speeds In the US Rank Dead Last Among Early Adopters (gizmodo.com) 77

Posted by BeauHD from the compare-and-contrast dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: A new report released by Ookla placed the U.S. at the very top of a list of 40 countries in terms of 5G availability. To determine this, Ookla tested to see what percent of users with 5G devices spent the majority of their time actually on 5G during Q3. Under that criteria, the U.S. ranked number one with 49.2% availability. But hold on, don't whip out your red, white, and blue foam finger just yet, it's not all good news. The actual download and upload speeds (in other words, the whole point) of 5G networks still vary significantly by country according to the report. Though the U.S. ranked first in availability, its actual download speeds were amongst the worst of early 5G adopter nations. Ookla placed median 5G download speeds at 93.73 Mbps in the US, far lower than the UK's 184.2 Mbps median and far lower still than South Korea, which led the pack at 492.48 Mbps. The U.S. placed around the same relative position for upload speeds as well. And while U.S. wireless customers can take some solace knowing they're on the top of the availability list, the list itself is unimpressive as a whole, especially in relation to the types of coverage necessary for 5G's most ambitious promises.
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5G Speeds In the US Rank Dead Last Among Early Adopters More

5G Speeds In the US Rank Dead Last Among Early Adopters

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  • US internet infrastructure is *terrible* (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @08:12PM (#62107647)

    Sorry. I lived there for a couple years, and the standard offerings by ISPs and Telcos are way too expensive for the shitty service they provide.

  • I honestly don't care too much about improved speeds from 5G. What I'm really hoping for is improved reception at all...

    So far it seems like that might be the case, I'm on T-Mobile and 5G seems somewhat better - but have other people found that to be the case? I think different carriers have variances on how they've chosen to roll out 5G and maybe some of them are prioritizing speed.

  • I don't, I'm perfectly happy with video streaming 1080p and using my phone as a hotspot. What I'm not happy about is carriers reducing range to facilitate 5G, I'd rather be able to access a webpage far away from home or call people than have 5G. The only time where I have wanted 5G is when I was in a stadium and I couldn't get 4G, I've been told 5G can handle more connections per tower, even then I could connect to the stadiums wifi and I was too lazy to do that. Remind me why we need 5G again? Oh because s

    • 5g has low frequency versions for distance.... but crappy as all hell speeds
      high frequency for terrible range, but high density and low latency.
      Everything else is so the telcos can sell tons of IoT.

      all together, 5g provides approximately no advantage for consumers. There will be odd cases... like stadiums, but if you're in a stadium that doesn't have good free wifi, just stop going there :) I honestly can't imagine how I would survive stadiums without youtube or netflix.

      5g is a standard that mostly addresse

      • I honestly can't imagine how I would survive stadiums without youtube or netflix.

        Please tell me you forgot to add the /sarcasm tag

      • Actually 5G destroys battery life if you actually use the max speeds with your phone. The higher the bandwidth the more energy it takes. I guess is overall it takes less energy than 4G

  • For all the hubris tossed about, we donâ(TM)t (Score:3, Interesting)

    by frdmfghtr ( 603968 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @08:22PM (#62107679)

    Another example of the US talking the talk, but not walking the walk. We used to be a world leader in many things, but we rested on our laurels and watched the competition catch up and on some areas surpass us.

    • They're too busy trying to make excuses for high infant mortality and thinking up other ways to say poor people should die if they can't afford health insurance. When they stop with that shit, then they'll be able to worry about internet speed. In the meantime, for most it's perfectly fine for what they're doing.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Looking at the table, all the countries near the top have Huawei gear installed, all the ones near the bottom decided they didn't want it. Not surprising really, Huawei invented much of the 5G technology and had a huge head-start over everyone else.

    • 5G is all about proximity to the towers - smaller nations have the advantage of a smaller geographic area to cover. Work your way down the list, how many of the "top" 5G countries could you fit inside the CONUS footprint plus Alaska?

    • Another example of the US talking the talk, but not walking the walk. We used to be a world leader in many things, but we rested on our laurels and watched the competition catch up and on some areas surpass us.

      As a Canadian looking at Technology around the world, the capitalists within the USA have sold out the country. Made in China is where we find the quality product. Made in Malaysia is where we find second best stuff, and somewhere around 5th position is the USA. Here again, the components for the USA products are not manufactured within the USA. By 2025, China will be #1, India #2, and somewhere below, the USA at #3 or #4. Loyalty to the dollar before loyalty to the country.

  • Meanwhile, one billion people have never been online. Let's keep some perspective.
    • Imagine the Third World Luxury of never needing to use that blazing hot 5G speed. I am jealous of their freedom.
      • A lot of their telecommunications infrastructure is refurbished gear from the first world. They'll be on 3G for years to come. Not sure what the figures are now, but Filipinos were sending 1bn SMS messages per day around late 2000's. India is improving, judging by the influx of Netflix subscribers. But Africa lags behind. Maybe you'd be happy there?

        • Lived and worked in a variety of developing countries during the 1990's in health technology. The problems are different, but so are the solutions. Folks tended to be much more practical and hands on when it came to solutions. Much less whining about things, much more doing. Ideas like "harambee" and "ubuntu" work better for communities than "kys" and "cancelled".

          • You're right about community. Everyone knows someone that can make or fix anything and things get done and paid for with what's available without involving large businesses, red tape or the tax collector. Something the West has lost through atomisation.

  • The current [purposefully] slow(er) speed is so they can later tell us they've "upgraded" and made things faster/better, and probably charge us more, w/o having to actually upgrade anything -- rather than giving us top performance now, then having to actually upgrade things later. This way, providers get to milk their current investment longer and pad their returns / salaries and bonuses, etc... From a competitive standpoint, they only have to be *slightly* faster than their competition, not *way* faster

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by olsmeister ( 1488789 )
      Speed is not even a factor I consider in a mobile carrier. Price, geographic footprint, and data caps are the main things I look at. I've never had any issue with speeds from any of the carriers I've done business with. The kinds of things I do on a smartphone, even using it as a hotspot, work fine at 4G speeds.
  • corporations, the media and politicians deploy marketing hype implemented with smoke and mirrors.

  • Hold up! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @09:48PM (#62107919)

    If there are bandwidth caps that can be exploded in a couple minutes using 4G, what is the purpose of upgrading 5G to the point where it can obliterate a bandwidth cap in less than 10 seconds?

    I keep hearing about how 5G is so great and fast but I haven't heard a damn word about increasing the size of monthly bandwidth allocations. I'm sure some telecoms thought people would be thrilled to pay $$$ for no reason but it really doesn't seem to be the case.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by splutty ( 43475 )

      There is no such thing as 'bandwidth caps' in the US. Instead you have the utterly moronic 'data caps'. Which make literally no sense.

      And those don't have a realistic underlying technical reason to begin with. Just a monetary one.

      • Yeah, yeah, data caps are what they call it. I know there is no realistic reason for them being so small but the question remains, "who would pay to burn them up even faster?" Honestly, I can only think of the 1% not caring about paying $500/month to use their smartphone which makes increasing the speed of 5G a pointless proposal.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Bumbul ( 7920730 )

          I know there is no realistic reason for them being so small

          There is no other reason than money for them to be there in the first place.

          Why have the bandwidth, if you can't use it without extra costs? I have only 4G, but it gives over 200 Mbps, and it's feeding my house wifi. Over 20 devices connected, including family (of 5) subscriptions for Spotify and Netflix. Any kind of data cap would make this setup unusable.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by splutty ( 43475 )

          Wrong way around. I don't "Want to pay $500/month". I just "Want to use the bandwidth, and NOT pay a completely arbitrary amount of money depending on a completely arbitrary amount of data I use in a completely arbitrary amount of time with no other reason than that a company can charge whatever the hell they want as long as they're not too much more expensive or restrictive as their, not always existing, competition."

        • Reminds me of when retina ipads came out and folks were enjoying fantastic, HD videos over their cell service, until they exhausted their data plan with the second or third movie!

    • Re:Hold up! (Score:4, Informative)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Thursday December 23, 2021 @12:07AM (#62108229)

      If there are bandwidth caps that can be exploded in a couple minutes using 4G, what is the purpose of upgrading 5G to the point where it can obliterate a bandwidth cap in less than 10 seconds?

      You're looking at the wrong end of the spectrum. 5G isn't intended to improve your cellular data speeds when there's no congestion. As you point out, the speeds are already so fast in that case that there's almost no benefit for making them faster (which makes the median download speed benchmark used in TFA pointless).

      5G is intended to decrease the number of times when you suffer lag, delays, or slow speed due to congestion. MIMO allows multiple phones to transmit simultaneously at the same frequencies with less interference, And higher throughput allows data requests to be completed more quickly, clearing the airwaves for the next data request.

      If any journalist actually understood this and wanted to test it, they'd take a couple dozen phones, and have them each simultaneously request like 100 MB of data from the same tower. Then measure how long it takes for all phones to complete the request on average, and how long it takes the slowest phone. Compare on 4G vs 5G networks.

      The median download speed can sort of act as a proxy for this - if you can guarantee nobody else is using the tower at the time of your tests. If you can't guarantee this, then the data is suspect. The UK and South Korea may have higher 5G speeds because they have faster networks. Or maybe because they have fewer people with 5G phones, so their 5G towers have less average utilization. No way to tell from the data that Ookla gets.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        The ookla data is pretty useless all around.. They are benchmarking connectivity by the peak available last mile speeds (since most providers now have a local speedtest server and many prioritise traffic to it). That's the equivalent of rating a car by its top speed and completely ignoring every other factor like fuel economy, handling, comfort etc - most of which will be more important to the vast majority of users than top speed.

      • 5G is intended to decrease the number of times when you suffer lag, delays, or slow speed due to congestion.

        That's it's technical design but it's corporate design has always been to get more money out of you with the hope of making more devices reliant on it.

        You have to remember that corporate design is to be a drug dealer, not a healer.

    • Majority of 5G deployments are NSA thus sharing the 4G EPC installed PGWU and SGWU. Unless bandwith of SGi interface is greatly increased you will see little performances unless carroers do local brakeout

  • Do these bitrates really matter? (Score:3)

    by Entropius ( 188861 ) on Wednesday December 22, 2021 @09:58PM (#62107937)

    I can't think of what I would need more than 93 Mbps on my phone to do.

    Besides, most of my wasted time online is spent waiting on shitty cloud services or javascript-choked webpages to do stuff. Doesn't matter if you have 1Gbps internet, these things on the other end are going to be slow.

    What would actually matter would be getting the cost of mobile data down. If 5G enables higher bitrates over the same amount of spectrum, then you'd think it would cost less. I don't want to stream video on my cellphone at 8K resolution, but it might be nice to stream 480p video without worrying about my phone bill.

    • I just want better coverage. They love to go on and on about "faster speed!" but that's not really a problem on my phone.

    • Divide that 93Mbps by thousands of people on one tower in a dense urban environment. You don't need more speed. But more people need some speed. The fact that you get unbelievable off-peak speeds are not really the point - even though it makes for great marketing material.

      What would actually matter would be getting the cost of mobile data down.

      Why do you think they artificially limit data plans with caps? They don't have the capacity the way people actually use phones. The problem is that they'll still probably be bandwidth limited at peak times in dense areas. But this is

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The high speeds are aimed at wireless broadband users. In places where wired broadband is crappy, wireless is sometimes they only decent choice.

      For home use data caps become a major problem. Some games are >50GB downloads, plus updates. Speed wise 4k YouTube is around 45-65Mbps depending on the content. While 93Mbps may seem to satisfy that requirement, that's only for one person and assuming that it is a sustainable speed.

      • Oh, for sure -- wireless broadband would be great, if it could replace my cable modem.

        But the concern about wireless broadband right now isn't speed; it's cost. Right now my LTE connection can do about 20 Mbps -- costing me a dollar every 40 seconds. If 5G can let me do 200 Mbps costing me a dollar every 4 seconds, that doesn't really change my capabilities. But if I can get 20 Mbps costing me a dollar every 40 *minutes*, now this is progress.

    • This is really funny. So US is not keeping up with some technology, and all of the sudden people are questioning if it is even necessary. What's the point? Why would we need to adopt it? It is by choice that we're behind others! That's not the reason you're lagging. The US is loosing some of its edge. Let it sink in. No worries, we still love you even if you are not the greatest in all areas. (Probably even a bit more)

  • Just like Gigabit Ethernet USB 1.0

    While the lights may be on, there is no one at home.

  • Maybe there's a good reason behind this finding:

    U.S. 5G providers are better at optimizing profitability; while in other countries, management is more likely to just leave the bandwidth gates wide open, so anyone can effectively get more than they pay for, by consuming large chunks of a finite resource for frivolous reasons. (E.g., streaming the SpongeBob Movie in 4K.)

    Those who don't understand the importance of maximizing profitability will mod me as a troll. Instead, they would do well to keep reading.

    • Re:Maybe U.S. is better at optimizing profitabilit (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fafalone ( 633739 ) on Thursday December 23, 2021 @12:53AM (#62108339)
      Well, I kept reading and decided just modding you troll was insufficient to express what a dbag you are, so here's a virtual -1 Troll and some explanation of why you're a dbag:

      1. There are little old ladies receiving modest pensions, whose pension funds have invested in 5G providers. To the extent that companies maximize profitability, those ladies will have a less uncomfortable retirement.

      But there's far more little old ladies on fixed incomes who are hurt much more from the day to day expense of the higher bills related to charging more and giving less. And the connection you're drawing is tenuous at best; there's a strong case to be made offering a better value would attract more customers, creating equal or more shareholder value compared to maximizing profit margins from a lower number of customers. Of course who cares about rank and file investors when better margins justify higher executive pay?

      2. To the extent that companies maximize profitability, they'll be less resistant to giving rank-and-file employees a much-needed raise.

      hahahahah. Oh, wait, you're serious, let me laugh even louder. AAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. The fuck are you smoking? Minimizing payroll costs is the 'maximize profitability' strategy they're employing. For everyone outside the top tier of the company, paying anyone else more means them taking less, which ain't happening unless they feel they absolutely need to in order to retain the required talent.

      3. Companies pay taxes on profits, not sales, so they pay more taxes when they maximize profitability.

      First of all, more total profit is more total profit, even if it's a lower profit/subscriber. Second, our tax needs should be addressed by increasing the ridiculously irresponsible corporate tax cuts from the "party of fiscal responsibility" that blows up the deficit every time they're in power far more than the 'tax and spend' party.

      etc, etc, etc, etc, etc. Fuck people whose thinking like you has resulted in this country having a lower standard of living outside the top few percent than every other wealthy democracy. With our position post-WW2 we were providing the best in the world for that, then dbags like you started doing everything possible to concentrate all wealth in the upper class mostly just sitting in giant Smaug piles doing nothing, while Americans now lag behind almost every wealthy western democracy for everyone who's not at the top. Fuck everything about your mindset.

      • Maximizing profit is not always about "charging more and giving less." Sometimes the opposite is true. Later in your post, you seemed to realize that, but you sure like putting those incorrect words in my mouth.

        Here's an example where maximizing profit is about giving more to your customers. Two years ago I changed ISPs, because my ISP hadn't offered me a bandwidth increase in years. After I switched to a different provider, my former ISP decided it would be in the interest of its own profitability to d

  • 4G and 3G were much better. :(

  • Of course the 5G in the US is congested, it has 203M vaccinated people to track. Service is way better in Idaho than in Massachusetts.
  • just because of the world we live in, i'm sure i'll be hearing some new conspiracy theory that the 5G speeds in 'merica are low due to people resisting getting their vaccinations....

  • Personally, I don't feel a need for 5G. LTE works great for anything I'm trying to do. If things are slow, it's most likely my phone or the remote service, not the pipe. Same for my home internet: it's been years since the speed of my pipe mattered (except for one-off events, like major software updates).

    That being said, this sounds like a reasonable tradeoff. For a given pool of money, you can probably deploy N fast towers or 2N slower ones. That doesn't sound crazy to me.

  • In Amsterdam I get twice those US 5G speed, simply on LTE-A, also known as 4G. 5G allows only more efficiency for the mobile provider to handle more clients per tower. The speeds are simply not higher than LTE-A or 4G. That is just the marketing bullshit. Higher speeds can only come from higher frequencies. Again, you wouldn't need 5G for that. In general you can transmit data faster on higher frequencies. But they can't penetrate buildings etc.
  • It's very sad, because when I'm on business trips, I constantly need a connection and need to be in touch. And in general, I recently realized that I am not very good at using some applications. And so I saw an article on the Internet about how to remove someone from whatsapp group [nection.io] and realized that this is useful information and it is worth spreading it to colleagues.

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