5G Speeds In the US Rank Dead Last Among Early Adopters (gizmodo.com) 77
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.
US internet infrastructure is *terrible* (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:US internet infrastructure is *terrible* (Score:4, Informative)
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I have the same problem in San Antonio with Tmobile and did the same thing
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I always assumed the "shithole countries" Trump was referring to were the trashy bits of America he could see from the window as he flew between golf courses.
No surprise (Score:2)
Is reception better though? (Score:1)
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.
Re:Is reception better though? (Score:5, Funny)
What I'm really hoping for is improved reception at all...
Buy an aircraft radar altimeter [alpa.org] for better reception...
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For T-Mobile, in the city I've gotten 500 mpbs bandwidth. In a rural area where I used to get no signal, the 600Mhz 5G is working to have a solid 10-12 mpbs.
Do you really need it? (Score:2)
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
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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
5g is a standard that mostly addresse
Re: Do you really need it? (Score:2)
I honestly can't imagine how I would survive stadiums without youtube or netflix.
Please tell me you forgot to add the /sarcasm tag
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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)
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.
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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.
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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.
Re: For all the hubris tossed about, we donâ( (Score:1)
Re: For all the hubris tossed about, we donâ( (Score:2)
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?
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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.
First World Problems (Score:1)
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Re: First World Problems (Score:1)
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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".
Re: First World Problems (Score:1)
Re: Interesting 5G study out of California .. (Score:1)
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What a crock of shit. Its a study of studies - there was no testing whatsoever of '5G' and COVID-19 together at the same time. Plus the study covers 2G-5G, so its not really about 5G at all.
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Not to mention that 5G is deployed (at least initially) mostly in densely populated areas. It isn't particularly shocking that transmission rates of communicable diseases are also higher in those areas. Nothing to do at all with 5G, but everything to do with population density.
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You could just as easily substitute "availability of public transportation" or "number of Vietnamese restaurants" for 5G.
Re:Interesting 5G study out of California .. (Score:5, Funny)
Check out this link to research connecting your tribalism clan and furries: https://xkcd.com/1138/ [xkcd.com]
Well duh (Score:2)
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
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This is what happens when (Score:2)
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Does anyone actually want 5G?
Yeah. The telecoms.
They are busy collecting all the bandwidth currently allocated to private radio systems, mesh networks and WiFi. And offering to sell it back to the existing users at a not insignificant markup.
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I don't need to stream 8K video while I'm driving; 3G and 4G are already sufficient for anything I need to do.
5G is about meeting the needs of extremely high density and extremely low density (low frequency, long distance). Farmland and long stretches of empty road needs the latter. While you don't need 8K video, during peak times the tower might otherwise be over capacity and slower than 1xRTT.
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The main benefit of 5G is that you can have more users in s given physical area before the network becomes overloaded and unusable. This matters a lot in densely populated cities.
The problem is people are selfish so this doesn't become a selling point until users start seeing problems from the 3g/4g networks being overloaded, by which time it's too late. So they advertise the higher speeds hoping to get people onboard.
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Tech generations in mobile phones are interesting in that way.
Basically not many people wanted the earlier generations either but each new generation has ushered in new things people do.
As you say 4g is enough to do things you do currently, but there is high likelihood that in few years something that is based on the higher bandwidth is in common use.
So mostly the uses have come once the tech is in place.
Hold up! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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Since when have corporations care about what you want? It's always been about what they can get.
Re: Hold up! (Score:2)
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)
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.
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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.
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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.
Re: Hold up! (Score:1)
Do these bitrates really matter? (Score:3)
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Pretty Standard (Score:2)
Just like Gigabit Ethernet USB 1.0
While the lights may be on, there is no one at home.
Maybe U.S. is better at optimizing profitability (Score:1)
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)
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.
Hey, non-dbag (Score:2)
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
5G sucks for rural and indoor areas. (Score:2)
4G and 3G were much better. :(
tracking (Score:2)
5G speeds probably correlate to covid vax rates (Score:1)
Good call (Score:2)
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.
I get 185Mbps in house via 4G (Score:1)
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