Phone network (Smarty) has recently switched to 5G with good availability in my area. Checked settings and all set up and accessing 5G, speed test confirms this (145Mb/s!) However, the little icon still reads ‘4G’ on the phone. tried a reset, phone off etc, but to no avail. Clearly it’s purely a cosmetic thing, but just wondering if there’s anything to do to change it.

Running iOS 15.2.1

EDIT: Perhaps the final stage is to contact Bill Gates and get the chip switched on?

If your iPhone model is capable of 5G then when you are connected to 5G it says so.

I get 5G behind our house from about 50m from home. In the house it wobbles between weak 4G and 3G. Thank goodness for WiFi calling.

If you were connected by 5G it would say so. You’re getting a very good 4G connection.

Thanks both. up until about a week ago 4G was around 20-30Mbs on a good day, and had been like that for years. Is 4G even capable of those increased speeds? I’ve been through various forums and the settings indicate that it should be picking up 5G if in range…

Anyway, first world issues. It’s nice to have a phone running speeds approximately 4x that of my home broadband!

My 12mini shows 5G when I rarely have it.

It’s only 12’s onwards that can do 5g

Yep, iPhone 13

If you use the Speedtest app (or website), does it report LTE (aka. 4G) or 5G?

I used to get 300mbps on 4g at my old house on vodafone, in my current place, I get 100mbps on EE but I am in a village so I think that’s good (3x my broadband speed anyway).

My Iphone 13 pro shows 5g only when connected to 5g, chances are Smarty/Their host network have upgraded your local mast (even if it’s still only 4g as there are several different types of 4g, and they may have just upped the capacity/removed speed limit).

Holy f.uck!

Phone now says 5G. Speed is up to 340Mb/s!

@robvalentine your explanation on 4G makes sense, was definitely much slower prior to last week.

Is 4G even capable of those increased speeds?

By the time each new standard has been released, the previous standard has had so many incremental enhancements that it is capable to achieving the baseline speed of the next one.

3G’s evolution was incredible: original max downlink throughput was 384 kb/s, by the time they’d added HSDPA and MIMO etc it was delivering 80 Mb/s!

4G’s first release was 100 Mb/s IIRC. Now has a max peak throughput of 1Gb/s.

Fair enough. My expectations are obviously much lower than what is possible, though no doubt clouded by the sh1te broadband performance via the copper wire…

be careful of your data allowance when doing 5g speed tests… each test for me burns through 500Mb data in seconds.

I get 5G behind our house from about 50m from home. In the house it wobbles between weak 4G and 3G. Thank goodness for WiFi calling.

You are clearly me!

I get 2mb (just checked) on my phone in the house and yet walk for a minute towards the main road, then full fat 5g.

My street is on a slight hillside away from the mast with my actual house being in a divot in said hillside. I dare say if I were to stand on my roof I’d get the good stuff.

You’re not wrong! Just checked, and I’ve rinsed through 2Gb already today, where as usually it’s 100-300Mb a day. Luckily I’m on 30Gb a month, and it restarts this week, but definitely something to be mindful of.

iOS doesn’t do what most people think on 5g.

iPhones will show the “5G” icon when the connected cell site has 5G or other local cell sites have it. It simply means 5G is available.

All of the Uk networks have rolled out 5G in an NSA / Non Stand Alone mode – which means devices remain connected to 4g for the purposes of negotiating how to transfer data.

For data transfer, network configuration will determine whether the data bearer is 4g/5G – so the phone may well actually be using 4g but still show 5g. 4g can now achieve speeds of 600Mbps and above on 3 and EE so a fast download and 5G icon may still be a 4g connection underneath.

At some point this year, uk networks may rollout SA / stand-alone mode for 5G – which will enable devices to connect directly to 4G first. Vodafone reportedly have a couple of cell sites operating that way for test purposes and I’m sure 3 / EE will be doing the same.