5G in the US is Disappointing Right Now, But It's Going to Get Better

We’ve been promised a fourth industrial revolution with fantastical things like remote surgery and driverless cars. Instead, what we have now is widespread 5G that’s more or less the same speed as (or even slower than) 4G and super-fast mmWave 5G in some parts of some major cities with highly limited range. So where is this 5G future we’ve been promised? The truth is that it’s coming along, but it will materialize more slowly and in less obvious ways than what we’ve been led to believe.

To understand the complicated 5G situation in the US right now, you first need to know that there are low-, mid-, and high-band frequencies that carriers can use. Low-band is slower but offers widespread coverage. High-band, often called mmWave, is very fast but extremely limited in range. Mid-band sits in a sweet spot between the two, with good range and better-than-LTE speeds. If you were building a 5G network from scratch, you’d probably want a bunch of mid-band spectrum, right? The trouble is, spectrum is a limited resource. Sascha Segan, lead mobile analyst at PCMag, sums up part of the spectrum problem. “Our government did not make the right channels available to the carriers,” he says. “Verizon and AT&T have basically just been using leftover odds and ends of their 4G spectrum... putting the 5G encoding on these leftover bits and bobs so they can pop a 5G icon on the screen. And the performance is meaningless.”

The networks might not be firing on all cylinders yet, but more and more mobile devices are ready for them. In fact, by the end of the year, it may be harder to find a non-5G phone than one that supports the technology. Michael Thelander, president and founder of wireless industry research firm Signals Research GroupThelander explains: “The first focus of 5G was really a feature called ‘enhanced mobile broadband’ and that’s just getting fast data speeds to the consumer on their smartphone. Things like factory automation and the functionality behind that, that was really developed afterwards, so it lags, from a standardization perspective.”