I remember people saying it would be faster than most wired connections.
In: Engineering
5G is not one thing, it’s a bunch of things.
The extreme high speeds talked up at the start of the rollout were possible using millimeter-wave radio. The downside of such high frequencies is terrible range, which means this form of 5G was only rolled out in very large cities.
So dude in Brooklyn getting 500mbps? Yeah. It’s cause you’re in Brooklyn.
Lower frequency 5G still offers higher speed than 4G for the given location, but without the crippling range issues….
Verizon did a huge mmWave deployment first (with limited coverage), TMobile did almosg exclusively the lower frequency stuff (as a paint the map pink project, even if it meant slower speed)… Don’t know what ATTs strategy was…..
The 5G connection CAN be as fast as they say, but it all depends on the infrastructure. Like if theres not enough towers, or links for each tower
The backlink of the cell tower itself is almost definitely a wired connection. Wireless is never going to beat the fastest wired connection of the same generation due to Shannon limit, which is the limit of how much information can be carried through a single physical medium.
When people say “would be faster than most wired connections”, they’re comparing it to the previous generation of wired connection. 5G is definitely faster than dial ups and early broadband, but the latest wired tech which is fiber is still easily much faster than 5G.
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