How good is 5G – review after real experience of use

How to connect to 5G network

How much talk about 5G, about new phones with 5G, about the assurances of mobile operators to start supporting 5G and increase the coverage of existing networks.

But how important is 5G? Is this really a breakthrough or a marketing ploy to force users to buy newer and more expensive phone models? It happens that new technologies advertised by marketers turn out to be hardly noticeable or simply invisible “by eye”. For example, a new generation of CPUs that either work faster, or work not faster, but better, or work even slower, but still somehow better – I think you roughly understand what I mean.

I am a real user of 5G mobile internet and in this post I want to share my opinion about 5G.

5G networks have appeared in my city, my phone supports 5G, so I decided to test this technology in normal use.

In fact, when talking about the Internet, including the mobile Internet, most users are primarily interested in only two characteristics:

Transfer rate (bandwidth).
Stability (reliability) of data transmission.

So I didn't invent any fancy tests, but just took measurements with Speedtest, and also used the Internet in my daily activities.

5G is a breakthrough in mobile Internet speeds!

Look at these screenshots:

Download speed 460 Mbps! If you are more accustomed to megabytes, then this is about 50-60 MB/s.

Data upload speed is about 30 Mbps!

Once again, mobile Internet at almost half a Gbps!

Not all users even have wired Internet at such speeds. That is, it is very fast.

Moreover, only router models that support the latest Wi-Fi standards are able to provide network connections at such speeds (in theory, in practice, speeds are much lower. For example, 802.11ac has speeds up to 1300 Mbps at 5 GHz plus up to 450 Mbps at 2.4 GHz.

I use my phone as a mobile hotspot through which my computer accesses the Internet. The Access Point must be enabled at 5 GHz, otherwise the Wi-Fi speed at 2.4 GHz may simply not be enough.

I made these measurements of the speed of accessing the Internet through a phone and a 5G network on a computer.

How stable is the Internet in 5G networks

To test how long the high speed of the Internet will last for long periods of time, I decided to check on torrents.

I got about half the speed compared to the measurements on Speedtest. However, I do not think that this is the limit. The fact is that the speed of downloading a torrent depends on the number of people involved in downloading and uploading a file (Seeds and Peers). But even relatively large files at such speeds are downloaded quite quickly. That is, at the beginning of the download there are few Seeds, so the speed is incomplete, in the future the number of Seeds increases, but the download of the file is coming to an end.

That is, I believe that even when downloading large files, 5G networks can consistently have high Internet speeds.

See also:

What you need to use 5G networks

You won't get any benefits from 5G if your phone doesn't support 5G networks. That is, first, you need a phone with 5G support.

To make sure your phone supports (or doesn't) go to Settings → Connections → Mobile networks → Network mode SIM.

If you do not see 5G there – then try clicking on the inscription “Network mode SIM” to see if there is a 5G mode.

If there is no 5G there, then most likely your phone cannot work with 5G mobile networks.

Of course, your mobile operator must deploy 5G mobile networks.

If both of these conditions are met, but your phone cannot connect to 5G networks, then this is possible for the following reasons (the list is not complete):

You are out of range of 5G networks.
You need to update your SIM card
You need to enable 5G support in settings as shown above

You won't get any of the benefits of 5G if your carrier plan has a rate limit

Look at the following screenshot.

It is made by the proud owner of an annual tariff plan, which is unlimited (for the number of Gigabytes), but is limited to 10 Mbps.

That is, if you have chosen a tariff plan with a speed limit, then when you switch to 5G, you will not notice any difference. The Internet speed on your phone will be limited by the speed of your data plan.