Thinking of buying a 5G smartphone? Finding your carrier’s flavor of 5G requires a taste for investigation

5G wireless is no longer vaporware, but a lot of haze still surrounds the forms of 5G each nationwide carrier sells. The major carriers began rolling out 5G coverage more a year ago. However, their maps don’t clarify what sort of next-generation mobile broadband touches your neighborhood, nor can you easily identify the level of 5G service a phone provides. “Marketing from a 5G perspective is all over the place,” said Carolina Milanesi, an analyst with Creative Strategies. The underlying problem here is that US carriers offer three kinds of 5G, each on different sets of frequencies that trade speed and coverage.