Yeah but how is coverage? I stick with Verizon just because that is the one thing I can rely on from them. Their 5g is in the second tier unlimited plan, but it does have other perks as well, like free Hulu/ESPN/Disney+.
Of course, we don’t have 5g here in Seattle anyway do we?
Well that’s the confusion, there’s 3 different types of 5G. Super-fast but can’t even penetrate a window, somewhat faster but poor coverage, and not really faster at all but great coverage and better concurrency with many users.
The first one is bullshit and doesn’t matter. The second you probably don’t have, and the third you probably do. And while the third technically isn’t any faster, your experience will probably improve because there’s less competition for bandwidth.
I made the same switch but from Verizon. Better prices, better (and reachable) customer service.
I haven’t seen any differences in coverage. Unless you spend time in really rural areas, I think all three major carriers have pretty much saturated coverage nowadays. I remember the frustrating days of using AT&T’s app to report coverage issues not that many years ago, but in the past six years I’ve used Verizon, then AT&T, and now T-Mobile, and coverage hasn’t been an issue.
Not an issue in that you get a working signal everywhere, but low-band 5G should improve latency and bandwidth in congested areas.
T-Mobile’s rural coverage say, out in the mountains between NC and TN, is still pretty dire. I usually don’t have signal when visiting the area for cabin parties or whatnot. Hell, there’s parts of town here in the Raleigh area that it tanks.
I had Sprint when I moved back to WA 5 years ago (Bothell), and it was unusable. I had to switch back to Verizon. One thing I can say about Verizon, I have lived all over the country, and I could almost always rely on them, even when in the middle of nowhere.
Yeah, Spring/T-Mobile is terrible here as soon as you get east of Troy. Basically nothing until Bennington, VT.
We have to have Verizon where I live, because otherwise coverage is spotty. Of course, the whole state is spotty in most places. The Northeast Kingdom has large areas with zero coverage from any provider. It’s a remote region up in the NE part of the state.
I remember when I was running Handheld Computing from Vermont and they’d send me GSM phones (Cingular?) and there was no signal in the entire state.
It’s better now, but nowhere near where it should be, sadly.
The low and mid-band usage is not different than that in LTE, where the low-band is used to fill coverage holes and mid-band is used to offer more capacity. But both scenarios in 5G are respectively better than their LTE counterparts, in the spectrum usage, and also latency. To complicate this even further, there are some 5G applications which go for ultra low latency, the infrastructure for which will take a while to build, but it promises to give ridiculously low latencies and at extremely low packet loss margins.
Then there is the ‘mmWave’ which you call useless, but it really isn’t. 28GHz and 39GHz signals do have high propagation losses but an amazing amount of technology has gone into the antennas and beam-forming capabilities. Imagine, a 5G base station pointing a beam directly towards you in a very narrow profile so as to concentrate more power in the region where it’s needed most. The propagation losses will be large, but you can still get a decent signal.
Initially only the dense urban areas will have this mmWave signal coverage, as the technology is expensive, but it’ll become more usable with time. Keep in mind that unlike the 3G to 4G switch, the initial 5G capabilities will be anchored by 4G signal coverage. In early days of 4G, when you made a phone call, you’d leave the 4G network, and make a GSM/UMTS call on 3G network, and then attach back to 4G. Some of us on AT&T network who don’t have AT&T store purchased phones are still forced to do that for no reason. However with 5G, you’ll have an always-on 4G connection. The voice calls will always go through 4G side, and it’s very much needed for 5G mmWave because of its potentially spotty coverage. The data streams can switch back and forth between 4G and 5G seamlessly, without bringing down your network connections. In fact, they can even go on both mid-band/low-band 4G and mmWave 5G simultaneously, giving even higher throughputs. In time 4G anchors will go away, and 5G will stand on its own, but this seamless interworking (in theory) is what will make this transition better than the one we had in going from 3G to 4G.