What To Expect from 5G Technology | Speed Test By Spencer Ryan

What's going on everybody, my name is Spencer Ryan, so 2020 has been a pivotal year for cell phones, especially because of the carrier. Push for 5g can mean a million different things. A lot of it is just you know, trying to get you to feel like you've got the best thing, but there are a couple implementations of 5g that can be useful to you as a consumer. The biggest question is: what does 5g mean for us as consumers? Well, it's important to understand that. There's a couple of different variations of 5g right behind me. You can actually see a 5g millimeter wave tower from Verizon, and I'm actually picking it up right now on my cell phone in the top right corner, it says 5g ultra-wide band.

There are a couple of these 5g ultra-wide band towers, located here in Raleigh, North Carolina, they're, very oddly and uniquely placed I actually don't understand why they place them. Where they do, we don't have any in the metro area downtown. We have a couple here around the mall, but they don't even reach the mall which we'll get into in a minute, but they do exist, and they are here. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to go around test a couple of these towers so that I could show you what you could expect from millimeter wave 5g technology and what you can also expect on a day-to-day basis, because the reality is these towers, don't travel far, and they're few and far in between right now here at the end of 2020. So what we'll do is we'll go through test.

A couple of these towers use speed test to see what you can expect from a tower like this. How close you need to be how far you have to go before you start to lose range, and then we'll dive more into the overall aspect of 5g when we get back all right so right here, you can see that we have 5g ultra-wide band, we're right next to this tower, so I'm going to pull up speediest. net app, and we're going to go ahead and run a speed test. We're about what would you say, a couple of yards, a couple of yards away, not too far um. So, let's run it so right now we're getting about 800 megabits per second download speed and seems to be capping at about 140 megabits per second upload speed, not too bad.

This is kind of comparable with home fiber networks, so let's walk a little ways away and see how that affects the signal and the speeds that we get about 600 now we're pushing 700 again, ironically now we're at 800 again, so we don't seem to be suffering too much in between these towers. So again, the concept behind 5g, millimeter wave is that it doesn't travel far, and it doesn't travel well through objects. We have a McDonald's building right here to our left, and we're getting ready to go into a tunnel, that's kind of lower than the ground. There's a lot of concrete around this brick wall. There's a building, let's see what it does when you know the direct connection between the tower, and you are obstructed.

So we just lost the 5g right here in direct line from the tower and the McDonald's to me, and I think that it would be safe to say that the 5g tower is probably what the same distance, maybe 200 yards away from us, and even though we were about 200 to 300 yards away from each tower, specifically in this case, because we have a building in direct line of that tower. I've completely lost my 5g signal. So now what you can see is it still says 5g in the top right, but I don't have the millimeter wave, which is really the 5g. That's going to matter the most. So what we can do is we can run a speed test on this 5g and see what we get.

Knowing that there's a millimeter wave tower right around us instantly as soon as we lost that millimeter wave we're getting 40 35 megabits per second download, and there is a 5g millimeter wave tower, almost 300 300 feet away from us, so we're surrounded by 5g towers. My phone says I have 5g, but we're getting closer to 4g LTE speeds with just a small bump and boost, so we're getting ready to lose the McDonald's building in our direct line of sight to that tower. It's only a matter of time before we pick it up either we're going to pick up this tower or we're going to pick up the one over there, but I feel like we're closer to this one all right. I can see the tower now directly from here, and we just picked up ultra-wide band, we'll go ahead and run a speed test, pushing 200, 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, 800 865 megabits per second down and looks to be around 50 up. Let's go check another tower in the city, see if we get any kinds of different results in a different environment, and then we'll head back and discuss 5g a little more in detail and what that means for you as a consumer, we did go out and test another tower, but unfortunately my microphone wasn't on, so it wasn't recording any of the audio.

The experience was actually pretty similar, though the tower looked a little different. This time you see these towers all over the place. You probably recognize them in your area, they've been putting them up in a couple of different places, but as soon as you, you know, break that 300 feet. Mark you're, going to start to lose your signal, and you're going to go right back into the mid-band or low band or even LTE all right. What does all of this 5g stuff really mean when you're discussing 5g, it's really important to understand the concepts of 5g and what types of 5g out there exist? So there are three types of 5g.

You got low band, which is essentially like a blanket 5g coverage. It is the lowest speed capable band of the entire 5g network, and then you've got the mid-band. Mid-band is about five times faster than what you would experience on.4G LTE sprint is pretty much the only one to capitalize heavily on mid-band, and then you've got the high band or millimeter wave, which is actually what you were seeing me test. That is the super short distance, can't go a long way, but delivers insane speeds at low latency and then to make it extremely complicated. All the carriers are approaching 5g completely differently, so for ATT they have something called 5g e, which is actually not 5g at all.

It is just an optimized version of the LTE network that they marketed as 5g e while they build their actual 5g network, and then they use the low band, which is kind of like the blanket 5g and the high band, which is the millimeter wave. T-Mobile is pretty much the only carrier right now to be capitalizing on all three bands: they have the low band, the medium band and the high band or the millimeter wave. And ironically, when you're on the 5g network with T-Mobile, you don't get this distinguished between the two you pretty much just have 5g as a matter of fact all the phones that t-mo will use, at least as of the time it's recording whenever you are on a 5g network, regardless of which band you're using it's just 5g and then verizon has 5g low band, which is the blanket 5g coverage, and that's what I typically get on my 12 pro max when I'm not connected to ultra-wide band. Unless I'm in a low service area, and then you have the ultra-wide band or the millimeter wave now Verizon is the only one who has coined ultra-wide band when they're discussing 5g, and it's not to be confused with, like the ultra-wideband technology, that apple put in the iPhone to discover. You know the devices around your phone, it's a completely different concept, but they've coined the millimeter wave as 5g ultra-wideband.

So right now, at the end of 2020, as consumers we're starting to see these 5g phones flooding the network. What does it mean to us? Well, the reality is that most of us are not going to experience. The insanely fast speeds that millimeter wave technology can give us at the moment. Millimeter wave is being implemented, but it takes a lot of work and a lot of infrastructure. It has to be literally from block to block as consumers we're going to see more benefit in the short term from the low band and mid-band technologies of 5g, specifically T-Mobile and sprint, because T-Mobile and sprint are destined to merge.

So T-Mobile has already been working on the low band in high band, and then they're going to go. Take the mid-band from sprint when they merge, so they're going to have the trifecta of 5g technology. Still, though, this is going to take some time and the reality is, is even with the mid-band being what is it five times faster than LTE? It's not a terrible difference. I mean to me, I think LTE is pretty good speeds. When you get into millimeter wave, you know getting up to gigabit.

I mean that's insane, but personally, I'm not always downloading insane amounts of data to where it really matters, I'm usually just streaming music. If, if I'm watching Netflix on the go, which I rarely do, I guess I could see that being a huge benefit, but for the most part I'm not funneling a lot of data through my phone, and I think that when 5g millimeter wave technology does eventually become more mainstream, we will find better use cases for it. They're even talking about the self-driving cars using the millimeter wave technology, there's a lot of opportunity there, but we're not there as a society. Yet the infrastructure is not built there. As a majority of us we're just going to see the low and mid-band- and most of us are just going to see low band, for example with me and verizon's, really just capitalizing on that low band, and they're implementing high band or ultra-wide band, wherever they can.

So when I'm walking around with my 12 pro max- and I see that little 5g icon, I can still expect speeds of 40 to 50 megabits per second down and 10 to 20 megabits per second up. So as consumers should we be extremely excited about 5g? Should we be excited about the fact that now these phones can handle these types of technologies? Yes, and no? The reality is for most of us, it's not going to change over the next couple of years, but when we do eventually see these millimeter wave technologies deployed in much, much more capacity, it's going to be something to be excited about. Smart cars are going to utilize it as consumers. We're going to be able to download things on our phone and do things we've never been able to do before and then even for home use. People that don't have great cable lines or don't have fiber lines are going to be able to utilize 5g millimeter wave technology in their home, so that is my super simple breakdown of 5g and what we can expect as consumers, who have phones that are capable of this technology.

I hope you liked this video. If you did, please give it a thumbs up. Let me know in the comments if you've ever used 5g before and what your experience has been. Like, I'm curious to hear what you know. Some of you guys out there have been dealing with when it comes to 5g and if you even have millimeter wave in your area as always press the subscribe button.

If you haven't already thanks for watching, follow me on Instagram at the Spencer Ryan, where I post a bunch of tech content, and I'll see you on the next video you.

Source : Spencer Ryan