When I search up new SIM cards most websites say stuff like ‘5G on all SIMs guaranteed’. So what is the difference between this and the 5G guaranteed phones?
In: Technology
There’s nothing different about a 5G SIM card.
All a SIM card is is a unique identifier for the network to be able to recognise your device on the system. Literally stands for “Subscriber Identity Module”.
You can of course subscribe to a carrier (or a plan) that does or does not support 5G – but that’s a difference with your subscription, not the sim card.
A phone being 5G capable or not is whether it has the internal hardware to be able to communicate with the 5G network. That is the only thing that matters from a technical standpoint.
I feel like you are confused about how to access 5g, so I’ll explain that more broadly instead of answering your specific question.
Your phone is a piece of hardware that basically functions as a sender and receiver. It has an antenna to communicate with mobile towers, but information about how to communicate with these towers is contained within the SIM.
The current generation is 4g, so pretty much every phone has a 4g antenna and there is 4g infrastructure around the country wherever you are that allows your phone to communicate over 4g. However, 5g is in development, so only some of the latest phones have a 5g antenna. This is what is meant by a 5g capable phone.
But in order to use 5g, there also needs to be 5g infrastructure which your phone can communicate with. This is where the 5g capable SIMs come into play. It allows you 5g capable phone to use its 5g capabilities by communicating with the 5g infrastructure. Of course this requires your country to have established 5g infrastructure, but if your telco is saying “5g on all SIMs”, then there is a good chance that you can receive a 5g signal from wherever you are.
So to answer you question now, you need both a 5g capable phone and a 5g SIM, in order to get 5g on your phone.
There’s also a little caveat where there are actually three types of 5g (depending on the frequency used), and some phones don’t support all types.
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