<story><title>AT&amp;T’s current 5G is slower than 4G in nearly every city tested by PCMag</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/atts-current-5g-is-slower-than-4g-in-nearly-every-city-tested-by-pcmag/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sandworm101</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; use beamforming to finish your download at Gbps speeds and get you off the network faster&lt;p&gt;Ya, &amp;quot;Faster speeds mean people will spend less time clogging the connection&amp;quot; ... it never happens that way.  Increased speeds mean people use more internet, not less. Consumers start doing new things with the faster speeds (streaming video etc) increasing demand and overall usage.  The only real answer is massive and &lt;i&gt;constantly increasing&lt;/i&gt; speeds and bandwidth capacities.  It is a race that cannot be won but must be run nevertheless.</text></item><item><author>kayson</author><text>I really believe that for commercial cellular in urban areas, 5G is more of a benefit for the carriers than the consumers. While low band spectrum (850MHz) has decent penetrating power, the majority of 5G is deployed at ~5GHz and mm-Wave frequencies, where you won&amp;#x27;t get much of any signal through a wall, or even on the other side of the building. This is why so many 5G base stations have to be deployed; the coverage just isn&amp;#x27;t as good. But the improvements in base station handoffs and spectral efficiency will increase a carrier&amp;#x27;s total capacity, even if the end user doesn&amp;#x27;t see a massive benefit.&lt;p&gt;There are scenarios where you might see massive speeds, though. 5G heavily leverages Carrier Aggregation, where a client can connect to multiple channels at once, increasing bandwidth, and beam-forming, where the &amp;quot;shape&amp;quot; of the signal is modified to steer maximum power to the physical location of a client. If you happen to be near a base station with good Signal to Noise Ratio while downloading something large, the base station can allocate multiple channels and use beamforming to finish your download at Gbps speeds and get you off the network faster, freeing up spectrum time for more users at lower SNR&amp;#x27;s and bandwidths.&lt;p&gt;There is potential for much more impactful deployment of 5G cellular in rural areas where there aren&amp;#x27;t many buildings or walls blocking high frequency signal. The same goes for point-to-point links such as inter-building WAN or low latency self driving car to self driving car communication.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bleepblorp</author><text>How much cellular data people use is dictated far more by data caps and usurious overage charges than by the speed of their connection. With overage charges of &amp;gt;$100 a GB in some parts of the world, usage per person isn&amp;#x27;t going to increase just because speeds go up.&lt;p&gt;Unless the carriers have a sudden outbreak of generosity, data caps won&amp;#x27;t rise under 5G, so usage per person will stay the same but improved efficiency will allow the carriers to extract more profits from more people per cell simultaneously.&lt;p&gt;5G doesn&amp;#x27;t solve any problems for end-users. It solves the carriers&amp;#x27; problem of &amp;#x27;how can we get more people to use up their data cap faster.&amp;#x27;</text></comment>
<story><title>AT&amp;T’s current 5G is slower than 4G in nearly every city tested by PCMag</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/atts-current-5g-is-slower-than-4g-in-nearly-every-city-tested-by-pcmag/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sandworm101</author><text>&amp;gt;&amp;gt; use beamforming to finish your download at Gbps speeds and get you off the network faster&lt;p&gt;Ya, &amp;quot;Faster speeds mean people will spend less time clogging the connection&amp;quot; ... it never happens that way.  Increased speeds mean people use more internet, not less. Consumers start doing new things with the faster speeds (streaming video etc) increasing demand and overall usage.  The only real answer is massive and &lt;i&gt;constantly increasing&lt;/i&gt; speeds and bandwidth capacities.  It is a race that cannot be won but must be run nevertheless.</text></item><item><author>kayson</author><text>I really believe that for commercial cellular in urban areas, 5G is more of a benefit for the carriers than the consumers. While low band spectrum (850MHz) has decent penetrating power, the majority of 5G is deployed at ~5GHz and mm-Wave frequencies, where you won&amp;#x27;t get much of any signal through a wall, or even on the other side of the building. This is why so many 5G base stations have to be deployed; the coverage just isn&amp;#x27;t as good. But the improvements in base station handoffs and spectral efficiency will increase a carrier&amp;#x27;s total capacity, even if the end user doesn&amp;#x27;t see a massive benefit.&lt;p&gt;There are scenarios where you might see massive speeds, though. 5G heavily leverages Carrier Aggregation, where a client can connect to multiple channels at once, increasing bandwidth, and beam-forming, where the &amp;quot;shape&amp;quot; of the signal is modified to steer maximum power to the physical location of a client. If you happen to be near a base station with good Signal to Noise Ratio while downloading something large, the base station can allocate multiple channels and use beamforming to finish your download at Gbps speeds and get you off the network faster, freeing up spectrum time for more users at lower SNR&amp;#x27;s and bandwidths.&lt;p&gt;There is potential for much more impactful deployment of 5G cellular in rural areas where there aren&amp;#x27;t many buildings or walls blocking high frequency signal. The same goes for point-to-point links such as inter-building WAN or low latency self driving car to self driving car communication.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kayson</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s not what I meant. With higher SNR you can achieve much better spectral efficiency, so it makes more sense for spectrum-time use to allocate the most bandwidth to high SNR users as they need it. It&amp;#x27;s not a constant or necessarily noticeable thing. My example was an extreme one for illustrative purposes. It could just as well be downloading 1MB of web content at 300Mb&amp;#x2F;s.</text></comment>