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Are there rules for enforcing (and by whom?) the term “5G”? Or is it like the word “natural” for health food?
by waynecochran 8y ago
Are there rules for enforcing (and by whom?) the term “5G”? Or is it like the word “natural” for health food?
- TheOperator 8y ago4G was supposed to achieve 100mbit peaks and I have yet to see speeds even approaching this with 4G LTE. So if somebody is enforcing advertising rules they're doing a shit job...
- amanaplanacanal 8y agoOokla just told me I am getting 85Mbps download and 11Mbps upload on AT&T LTE.
- Consultant32452 8y ago76 down, 49 up with Google Fi on a Pixel 2 for me
- chungy 8y agoThis probably depends heavily on where you live, but I can easily get ~150 Mbps up and down on LTE, in Washington state.
- hunter 8y agoBlame your carrier. I get 82Mbps in upload and 10Mbps in download. Can't complain for €6/month.
- mciancia 8y agoI can easily get over 100Mbps on LTE, this is what I'm getting now: https://www.speedtest.net/result/a/4793874317 https://www.speedtest.net/result/a/4793874317
- throwaway663 8y agoNice. Can I get this all over Krakow on a tourist Sim?
- mamon 8y agoWhen it comes to this "Play" carrier in Poland high speeds are for contracts, prepaid SIMs are limited to 70 Mbps
- votepaunchy 8y ago4G was originally supposed to be gigabit before carriers started branding LTE as 4G.
- toast0 8y agoLTE was supposed to be 4G, before carriers starting branding HSPA+ as 4G.
- ken 8y agoThey seem to be branding LTE as even better than 4G. My phone has an "LTE" indicator on top most of the time, but it switches to "4G" when I'm in a basement parking garage with lousy reception. I'm not sure what these terms mean, and the phone/service didn't exactly come with a user manual.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoI'm on AT&T (personal phone) and I get 4.5M bits down on LTE. My Verizon LTE (work phone) gets very similar. Both are iPhones and completely up to date. I could be near enough to the towers that my fillings start to ache and I still can't get any faster.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- MBCook 8y agoMy record with Verizon is 104 down and 35 up. It all seems to depend on how busy the tower is and how good the backhaul is.
- madeofpalk 8y agoJust got 140Mbps in London https://i.imgur.com/DFpZAg8.png https://i.imgur.com/DFpZAg8.png
- joecool1029 8y agoLTE's initial iterations were actually not considered 4G by definition. Part of the longterm evolution part was that as the components were upgraded they would comply with 4G. I can break 100mbps down in a few places on an iphone SE with only a cat3 modem, but that's pushing the spec's real-world limit for that. Today these speeds are easily achievable on most networks, it's just unlikely for AT&T due to congestion and their poor network and spectrum planning. It helps to spend money on capex instead of buying up shitty Mexican carriers and DirecTV to stem the flow of fleeing customers.
- takeda 8y agoI was about to say that it was mostly Sprint and (again) AT&T advertising 3G as 4G, and for example Verizon had real 4G from the start. But now as I think, I remember that Verizon had 4G that was capped to about 1mbps in certain areas and then gradually speed increased per area.
- bskap 8y agoThat was a bit of a mess. Technically, no carrier at the time had a "real" 4G network, according to the ITU- only LTE-Advanced and WiMAX 2 met their definition. Since the ITU had declared that Sprint's WiMAX network and Verizon's LTE network weren't real 4G, T-Mobile decided that they could call their (just-as-fast-as-early-LTE-networks) HSPA+ network 4G too, and then AT&T was almost forced to follow suit because T-Mobile was advertising how their 4G network was so much bigger than everyone else's.
- joecool1029 8y agoIt should be noted that T-Mobile was the only one set up to deploy DC-HSPA+ at 42mbps peak theoretical. Scratching around 30mbps was around what Verizon could do before congestion set in on band 13. AT&T to the best of my knowledge only had HSPA+ at 21mbps, so it really was way more of a stretch for them to call their network 4G. So at least, yeah... tmo kinda could have argued it was similar to early '4G' radio technologies on speed alone.
- 8y ago
- rayiner 8y agoIt depends entirely where you are. Here in Maryland I’m getting over 200 mbps down on an iPhone XR: https://www.speedtest.net/result/i/3160011117 https://www.speedtest.net/result/i/3160011117
- vitus 8y agoThe requirements for the proposed 4G spec are actually even higher than that -- 100Mbps was for high-mobility clients, whereas low-mobility clients were promised 1Gbps speeds. https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/m/R-REC-M.1645-0-200306-I!!PDF-E.pdf https://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/m/R-REC-M.1645-0-20... page 9 defines high / low mobility as follows: "low mobility covers pedestrian speed, and high mobility covers high speed on highways or fast trains (60 km/h to ~250 km/h, or more)." (this is roughly 35 to 150 mph) We are nowhere near those speeds, even on the best networks.
- rayiner 8y agoThe ITU IMT standards are dumb and meaningless. They just set aspirational targets, but don’t define any technology for meeting those targets. ITU jumped from 200 kbps for 3G to 1 gigabit for 4G. That was not a useful definition and the market correctly ignored it. Imagine if we had “3G” wired networking defined as 100 mbps and “4G” wired networking aspirationally defined as 10 gigabit. What would you do when the IEEE (the folks who actually make the technology) release 1G Ethernet. Would you insist on calling it 3.5G wired networking? “4G” is LTE. It’s 4G because it’s what came after HSDPA/EVDO, not because it meets any particular ITU target.
- vitus 8y agoWithout any sort of backing specification, the terminology of 3G vs 4G vs 5G is dumb and meaningless, as we see with AT&T calling their network 5G (E), even though it's no better than what their competitors call 4G. Also, it's disingenuous to describe the jump as from 200kbps to 1Gbps, since HSDPA offering 14Mbps was already being deployed prior to when this particular ITU standard came out. (https://www.gsma.com/aboutus/gsm-technology https://www.gsma.com/aboutus/gsm-technology indicates deployments of HSDPA started in 2005)
- kakarot 8y agoI get about 2mbit w/ 4G LTE on a ~$50 plan... For the first week my phone showed 80-115mbit but that didn't last. My carrier tells me that in order to downgrade my plan I would have to first cancel my phone number and wait a month.
- ineedasername 8y agoI get 18mbit down, 4 up on the lowest end pre-paid tmobile plan. But I'm also in the suburbs of large metro areas where the networks are fairly well built out. However, this is one of the reasons I pay full price on my phone and stick to pre paid. Lot's more flexibility to up stakes and move to a different carrier if they start downgrading service.
- kakarot 8y agoI'm on prepaid but I'm paying for data consumption I just don't utilize given the abysmal speeds. I have to use a mobile VPN just to achieve decent peering. Basically to get around this absurd policy I have to switch to another carrier and back over two months. However, I don't plan to switch back once I make the jump. In the last year I've traveled to a couple states and a few dozen cities and I had garbage speed and latency in all of them. T-Mobile's solution was that I buy a new phone. But the phone achieved 100mbit when I first got my plan.
- sundvor 8y agoI got a 312 Mbit download Speed test the other day on my S10+. I will not be accepting Telstra's free Samsung S10 5g upgrade offer.
- dawnerd 8y agoI can get around 100 here with my Verizon hotspot. https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/3127192452 https://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/3127192452 Most places seem to be around the 40mbps mark but when visiting SoCal it drops to anywhere from 2mbps to 30.
- TomMarius 8y agoMy phone regularly downloads faster than 50 Mb/s during peak. Good enough for me. (Prague, CZ)
- pyk 8y ago5GNR (3GPP release 15) is the official globally recognized standard for 5G. Guessing 3GPP has some loose enforcement but not sure. http://www.3gpp.org/release-15 http://www.3gpp.org/release-15
- joecool1029 8y agoIn the US, ITU will just move the goalposts for 4G like they did for 3G when AT&T changed the hspa+ indicator to 4G. 3GPP has no teeth here.
- dontbenebby 8y ago> Are there rules for enforcing (and by whom?) the term “5G”? Or is it like the word “natural” for health food? Alternatively, they can slowly phase out 4g like they did with 3G. This is very useful if you have pesky customers stuck on cheap all you can eat data plans. The paranoid part of me wonders if it'll be an excuse to shunt people off of cheap plans.
- arcticbull 8y agoThe scam is much more obvious, AT&T wants to show everyone that they have 5G while everyone else has 4G, and that’s one extra G.
- reaperducer 8y agoAlternatively, they can slowly phase out 4g like they did with 3G. This is very useful if you have pesky customers stuck on cheap all you can eat data plans. The funny thing is that all that used 3G gear, at least the good stuff, seems to have gone to the deeply rural areas. I know a few towns that, as recently as last month, only have 3G service. But the data speeds I get roaming there on 3G are almost double what I get at home on AT&T with full bars of LTE.
- rayiner 8y ago“5G” isn’t a well defined term. In theory, it includes both LTE and 5GNR (the OFDM based “new radio” air interface) on parallel tracks: https://www.edn.com/5G/4458325/What-is-5G-NR https://www.edn.com/5G/4458325/What-is-5G-NR
- eli 8y agoThe “G” standards have always been more marketing than anything else. This whole scandal already happened when some carriers decided to call EDGE “3G”
- arcticbull 8y agoAT&T also tried to call HSPA+ 4G while Verizon had LTE, and switched the indicators on the iPhone IIRC.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y agoI am in downtown Denver Colorado and can’t even reach 10Mbps on 4G LTE (Att). In the Czech Republic, on a prepaid SIM card, I received around 50Mbps, many years ago. I have zero trust in these wireless generation differences. There are so many other variables in end-user speed.
- hijinks 8y agoI'm 15 minutes south of Denver and outside my house I barely get 2 bars of LTE and speeds are awful.
- EnderWT 8y agoCentennial here - 9Mbps download / 0.9Mbps upload
- peapicker 8y agoI’m in Centennial and get ~45Mbps down 7Mbps up with Verizon. Who are you with?
- innocenat 8y agoMost of the time you can feel the difference in "wireless generation differences." But USA isn't one of them.