4g / 5g – real world difference.

My contract is up on my current phone (galaxy s9). I was planning on keeping phone and going sim only, but current phone can only use 4g. Otherwise it’s fine bar the battery no longer lasting a day.

Having a look on EE website, 5g seems to be far more widespread than I thought – is 5g noticeably better than 4g and worth an upgrade?

Thanks

Bump, in case it’s still needed

I guess the answer is dependent on what you use your phone for. 5G won’t make calls faster or sms better but for anything web enabled (streaming, WhatsApp, browsing internet etc) it’ll make a massive difference.

Using speedchecker on my 4g signal at home I’m downloading at anywhere between 4 and 5mbps. During a recent visit to Glasgow I was downloading at 133mbps on 5g.

It was pretty damn quick I have to say. Certainly makes the reality of 5G internet at home an alternative to fibre links if the price point is right and you get a strong signal.

I’m on EE. Found some 5G the other day and as it was the first I’d noticed did a speed test – 85.3mbps. Just did a 4G one and got 66.0mbps.

So no, not a lot of difference, although it’s not exactly the most thorough of tests.

Depends what you’re using it for I guess.

That’s interesting – My thought is it could make “working from home” more flexible in location and get away from looking at the same 4 walls; ie park up the campervan and spend the day working down at the coast with a nicer view. Working would need to be the operative word though so need decent internets.

Sounds like it could make a significant improvement…

I’m on EE. my phone was well past upgrade and stopped taking decent photos – which is its joint most important job, if I’m honest. Went for a new contract and a new phone. 5G, because I want to keep it for a while.

No difference to anything near where I live but, when I helped my brother move house and looked at my phone, I saw “5G” on there. Fired up speedtest app. 394Mpbs download, 52 up.

Made zero difference to my life, beyond an ephemeral thrill to see unusual numbers on a screen. Would obviously a different story if I lived there and had a need to use those speeds/ could combine home BB and mobile contracts.

Unless you use it for tethering a bigger device for things like video conferencing it will make no difference in normal use apart from showing off a Speedtest result in the pub.

All the other apps will buffer so will get no tangible benefit.

Edit, I have my iPhone SE2 set at 3G for the same reason. 4G is a battery hog, as is 5G. There really is no point for a mobile phone. Even Teams VC works fine over 3G

Edit, I have my iPhone SE2 set at 3G for the same reason. 4G is a battery hog, as is 5G. There really is no point for a mobile phone. Even Teams VC works fine over 3G

Except when there’s something you really need to download, and you sit there watching the little indicator spinning away, or the progress bar crawl interminably across the screen and then it times out. I’ve tried downloading a song from Apple Music on 4G, and it takes forever, on 3G, it’s not even worth bothering.
And a battery hog? My phone always has 4G, Wi-fi and BT turned on, and if I’m not actually using it for playing music, then I can go a couple of days without charging it, but if I’m playing music, which is on the device, not streamed, it might drop 20% or so.
It’s an iPhone 11 Pro Max, so a substantial increase in batter capacity I would guess…
As far as 5G is concerned, it comes in two flavours, one is basically a bumped up 4G, which is what rural areas will get, and which won’t be substantially faster than 4G, but maybe more consistent, the other is mmWave, (or at least, I think that’s what it’s called), and will only work line-of-sight and won’t penetrate the walls of solid buildings. But then 4G struggles with that, my phone often can’t get a signal in many shops in Bath.

It’s better by 1g 🙂

I had 5G the other day for the first time in my home area (on Three) so ran a speed test. Got 691Mbps download and 57.3 upload. So pretty quick!! If that is important to you then it’s awesome, but makes very little difference to normal browsing and none to phone calls (does anyone do those these days?!).

As people are saying it depends what you use your phone for. Normal browsing, video calls etc. Then 4G will be just fine. Downloading massive files then 5G will be better.

I do wish they hadn’t bothered with 5G and just increased 4G coverage, but hey ho. I do wonder if contention will be lower on 5G than 4G to try and persuade people to move to 5G.

I can w@h fine on my 4G signal, managed it for 2 months with no issues at all. Video calls, usual uploads / downloads up to say 20MB. I recently updated my phone and stuck with 4G as I couldn’t see the benefit for me. I think if you lived in a place with stretched 4G or wanted to stream in 4K on the move then it may be worth it. Otherwise not sure.

5G also helps with capacity (amount of bandwidth shared between different users of the same base station). So if you’re in a busy location, you’ll probably fine a faster speed on 4G all things being equal. Ping speed will also tend to be lower (relevant for gaming).

5G helps dramatically with capacity, in terms of the number of devices that can connect in any given cell. Why is this important? Well, the number of devices we use is creeping up all the time. It used to be just two phones in this house – now we’ve got four sims for people (because kids now have phones don’t they?), our car has a sim, and even the smart charger has one. That’s triple what it used to be. It could easily be more with dongles and tablets etc.

I think that’s why the networks are pushing it, because it’s an engineering solution that they are going to need.

Just on the phone to EE now to get my sim upgraded to 5G for my new phone. Not expecting any amazing differences, but perhaps better connectivity and lower latency in busy areas. Not sure what it’s going to do to battery life, we’ll see.

5G is faster than 4G on paper. What you’ll see in practice will depends on relative signal strength in each band, number of concurrent users etc. I would epxect 5G to be faster generally as less people are on it at the moment, although I suspect coverage is a lot worse.

Coverage is dire, 4G was always a bit crap indoors but 5G basically doesn’t exist once there’s something between you and the transmitter.

number of concurrent users

Not really an issue until you get close to a network’s capacity if my comms training from more years ago than I care to remember still holds. Network speed slows a little as users increase but not greatly then when you reach capacity it all just drops off a cliff.

Ofcom has just auctioned off another tranche of spectrum – this time it’s reserved for 5G and in the 700Mhz band.

That’s the lowest band made available to operators so far and is likely to result in a noticeable improvement in voice and data coverage for o2, ee and Three users. Ee have already started rolling it out in urban areas but we can expect to see 5G appearing in some rural areas this year as well.

Speed wise, 5G@700 is unlikely to best 5G@3.6Ghz but will still offer an improvement over 4g in many areas. Three are continuing to roll out 10gig backhaul connections to their upgraded sites so expect some very fast download speeds in many areas as they have the most 5G spectrum overall.

5G is going to be irrelevant (over 4G) for most mobile users as that is not the benefit of it. The benefit is to be able to deliver broadband/high speed network into any building without needing the cabling infrastructure to each building (phones lines, fibre etc,.)