5G: Explained! By Marques Brownlee

Hey, what's up guys, I could be a she here. So I got kind of curious with seeing all these videos in my sub box for the past couple months of people getting taken to Chicago to test 5g and doing all these crazy speed tests. But then I started to notice they all sort of have a couple of things in common, but really it was just getting me curious about the whole thing, so I bought a 5g phone, and then I drove to the nearest 5g city and I tried it for myself. So this is my new $1600 Samsung Galaxy S 10 5g on Verizon, and so the crew and I drove from the studio to the nearest 5g city, which is Providence Rhode Island. So for those unfamiliar a brief explainer, what is 5g well, we all have 4G. Now 5g is the fifth generation of wireless network technology, and so all the big carriers are working on building out their 5g networks.

Right now, Verizon AT&T Sprint we're all working on 5g. The main theme of 5g is again sped. Every new generation of the wireless networks are significantly faster and more capable than the previous. Some of you may remember the old and very slow to G and 3G, and how much better 4G is than those 5g represents another step forward. So to take advantage of 5g, you need a 5g device with 5g radios and a 5g network.

So for me, that's the galaxy s, 10 5g, and it's Verizon who's building up their 5g network in certain cities, one location at a time, so you can't just get a software update to a 4G phone to just enable 5g. That's right! I'm, talking to you, AT&T, changing people's status bars to say 5ge when it's really just 4G. It's stupid. It's basically a lie. You're kind of trying to trick people into thinking they got 5g v GE is not 5g, it's still 4G.

It's really shame anyway.5G is built on what's called millimeter waves, it's a new section of very high frequency spectrum, upwards of 20 gigahertz, all the way to near 96 gigahertz, but the is the higher the frequency of any wave the lesser the range like that's just the truth. On paper, so for the same reason, five gigahertz Wi-Fi doesn't travel as far as 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi. The same reason, microwaves, don't cook things on the other side of the glass wall. That's the same reason: 5g doesn't travel as well through the real world, so millimeter waves the biggest problem is that even if you're standing pretty close to the node like a couple of hundred feet away, it only really travels well within direct line-of-sight, so things like trees and walls and buildings block and disrupt the high frequency signal, even if you're still close to it. I've heard even that rain in the air could potentially be a problem.

So this is why I wanted to test this for myself, so we drove to Providence Rhode Island, which is on the growing list of horizons.5G cities, it's not the whole city, that's one big 5g hotbed. It's only certain areas, sort of tucked away happens to be near Brown University, where we found one of them, and we found it by finding one of these. This is a 5g node or three nodes. To be specific. At the top of a light pole, you could tell because it said Verizon right on the pole and because, if you stand right next to it, with a 5g phone in your hand and run a speed test, the results are just absolutely ridiculous.

The 4G and the notification bar switches to indicate 5g, and you open up your app of choice and run a speed test, and I'm, seeing easy. Seven hundred eight hundred nine hundred, often well above a thousand megabits per second download the highest result. I actually saw in my personal testing, was 1.9 gigabits per second briefly from fast comm. That's just that's! That's just hilariously fast, like you could almost use your whole data cap in a minute. Dreamlike speeds very, very nice.

Of course, you want to see what this type of speed is actually good for other than a speed test, so YouTube videos just played instantly without any buffering in HD I, could fast-forward right off the bat, no problem. What browsing, of course, would be superfast hopping into the Play Store to download a gigantic game like pub G mobile progress moves pretty fast, not like a blink of an eye, and it's done but miles better than it would be on LTE. The fortnight downloader progressed faster than the fortnight. Installer would have meaning it's its crazy, impressive and downloading an entire stranger things' episode from Netflix in HD on this phone took about four seconds, so you could grab a whole season in probably like 30 seconds, if you wanted to which is again absolutely ideal, but again here's the thing. This is all while standing like right next to the tower with a direct line-of-sight.

You know perfectly ideal conditions, great weather, once I left that it kind of broke down pretty quickly so right around the corner of this brick building just to get into the shade so literally maybe 75 feet away from the node, but behind a wall I'm getting much slower, 5g, it's still 5g, but you can see the numbers here now. I mean it's kind of crazy to call 200 300 400 down slow, but compared to what I was getting before. That's a pretty big difference to basically cut your speed in half just by walking a couple meters down the block and I also noticed just by walking halfway down the block. I'd start bouncing back and forth between 4G and 5g and like it was frustratingly inconsistent. Even when I did have a line of sight with maybe a tree or two sorts of nearby, my phone would drop 5g and then jump back on again.

I think it's seated in the notification bar. It would drop back to 5g and then back to 4G. And then, when I was on 5g, and I ran the speed test. It would be great I get a thousand down again, which is Hussein, but when I ran it at 4G, I would get 4G speeds and it's perfect for G speeds. But it was just weird getting those results back-to-back like half a block away and what I waited a minute.

I'd suddenly get 5g again and get a thousand down. So what's the solution for this? Well, as we understand it, basically just putting a lot of nodes all over the place so essentially to maximize coverage and improve technologies, so that when you move behind one obstacle or sort of drive through a city, you actively switch between nodes that you're connected to kind of like we do now with 4G towers, but just much faster and I. Think that's the part that kind of scares people, it seems, seems like a brute-force way to actually go fixing the problem. But that's the current plan is just blanket areas with these lower powered cells that let you switch between them very quickly. Instead of one giant 4G tower, like you have now, my gut feeling is that an infrastructure where you cover an entire city and eventually an entire country in these little nodes is gonna, be incredibly expensive and probably take a very long time like years.

So it's a long way off, but here's another thing to notice. Even with me standing right next to a 5g node and holding a brand-new 2019 5g phone, there were still some drawbacks to notice. The main three are heat battery and upload. So for one the upload appears to still be happening at 4G speed. You want to connect it to 5g.

I, never broke 100 megabits per second up in all my testing, which is still a great speed, but my dream of uploading, a 8k YouTube video in like five seconds or going live-streaming high resolution VR or something like that are not possible at all. Yet now, you've probably also noticed the ping is still at 4G levels. ?. The goal is to get this down to a millisecond or less, but that isn't happening yet in these tests either and then heat and battery are something that this phone seemed to specifically suffer from when I was testing. I started my day when we got to Providence with 75 percent battery, did all my testing and that maybe took about four or five hours and when we finished I was at 21% battery and the phone was warm to the touch the whole time.

This is why you see 5g versions of phones coming out almost always have a larger battery than their normal for G brothers, including the Galaxy S 10, 5 G, and the phone getting warm during the testing ? when I wasn't even gaming or doing anything graphically intensive just watching some YouTube videos and download tests was a little concerning. So the bottom line, 5g is like folding phones right now in 2019, clearly not ready yet, but when you use it, and you get just the right use case, and you're at just the right space, you get this amazing little glimpse into the future that you wish was ready for right now, because it's so great, but it's not, and currently the cons, sort of outweigh the pros and I wouldn't spend extra money on it right now, in 2019, the future of 5g is really bright. Assuming you know the infrastructure happens and isn't too obtrusive and that's a big assumption, but then we're talking virtual reality streaming and networks of autonomous cars that are all internet connected and talking to each other and maybe even think about remote surgery with a 5g connected robot. In one country, with a doctor over here and a patient in another country and everything just working seamlessly like all this super high-bandwidth low-latency stuff, maybe the end of video buffering altogether all seem possible, but as of right now in 2019, it just isn't ready yet, but I'm super ready for what it is either way. Thanks for watching catch, you guys in the next one peace, big thanks to Word VPN for sponsoring this video.

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Source : Marques Brownlee