If I'm downloading podcasts for a flight, I do it on WiFi beforehand or on 4G on the plane. 5G in the terminal is really useful at getting you some service, but it's slow.
Probably a side effect of not enough backhaul speed.
If you don't, good luck with that.
Net neutrality is only about the connections between a provider and external networks, not about how a company handles bandwidth contention amongst its customers.
Net neutrality would fix a problem like “only Facebook is accessible inside crowded stadiums” not “AT&T customers who pay more get better connections in crowded stadiums”
It's entirely on the publisher side: net neutrality was an attempt to avoid ISPs getting paid extra---costs that would be passed onto you---in exchange for making your experience on site A be better than your experience with site B (or service, vs site).
Think: "Oh, yeah, Netflix 4k works great on your new Comcast plan! But if you want Hulu 4k, you're gonna need to pay us more, because Netflix pays us to make their shit work better than Hulu's if you don't!"
Think about it, when’s the last time you saw a funded campaign for something that was actually good for us? When’s the last time you saw Google campaigning for privacy?
To be clear, Google was doing this out of self-interest. Paying user ISPs for access to those users is not a cost they want to pay. But it's the same as any other protection racket. A local shopkeeper has personal reasons to not want to pay off the mob, but that doesn't mean their position is wrong.
When you add the second line---pretending that that nobody funding all the anti-net-neutrality let-big-ISPs-do-what-they-want stories that pro-legacy-company Republicans ate up---it makes me think this is some astroturfing, since it goes from "maybe this person fell for the ISP claims" to straight-up dishonest intentionally-misleading-fallacy.
Google was obviously on the side of "don't get charged twice" but ultimately net-neutrality was a tech enthusiast consumer position that came out of a desire to avoid getting charged more on the basis of what sites you did or didn't want to watch, and ISP's trying to influence where you visited by cutting deals to get paid to prioritize A vs B.
(Hell, ISPs were already getting paid "twice" for the bandwidth in some ways, e.g. when your "100Mb" plan only works at that speeds if your neighbors aren't using it much. That's a different sort of incomplete-advertising trickery that helped create the whole "too many people using Youtube are saturating the network!" "problem" in the first place.)
(And high-bandwidth publishers already were making private peering/colo-of-servers deals with ISPs and CDNs that I don't believe would've been prohibited by net neutrality, so the 'protection racket' aspect of the ISP's game was maybe more arguably wanting to be paid thrice? Or wanting to be paid without providing that colo service?)
The area where wireless networks fall short is coverage. Obviously many homes and businesses are difficult to cover with wireless technology. Also many "IoT" and public service situations need wide coverage, and a network that works in 92% of places is "close but not cigar." There are few obvious answers rather than "lots of fiber and very cheap small cells" and "satellite technology" but it's what it takes to address wireless use cases that currently aren't addressed.
e.g. Notably several major carriers in India skipped 3G entirely and went to 4G directly because it was cheaper per subscriber. Which implies less expensive equipment per unit performance?
Calling that 5G obscures the fact that millimeter wave 5G standalone is a totally different beast, and a huge network engineering challenge.
It may seem bureaucratic to regulate what people can call 5G, but US consumers get ripped off thinking they're on an advanced network when in fact you could call it the long-term evolution (see what I did there?) of the existing network.
This is on Mint Mobile, a budget MVNO now owned by T-Mobile. I pay $20/month for 15GB data.
I think a lot of people are attributing speeds of 200-700Mbps to mm wave when it's actually pretty ordinary speeds for 2.5-5GHz coverage today now that carriers have decent capacity there. If you're getting below 144Mbps, you're in the bottom 25% of T-Mobile's network experience. Over the past 6 years, speeds have gotten a ton faster, mostly from 2.5-5GHz spectrum. Verizon is the only carrier that put much effort into mm wave and it still covers basically nothing.
Ignoring latency, you're likely to get speeds similar to wifi from today's mobile networks without mm wave - unless you have a really great home internet connection and a good wifi setup. I have a MacBook Pro, but it only has wifi 6 and I can get 700-800Mbps out of my wifi, but I'm not getting 2Gbps from it.
How is it a better deal to spend more money for essentially the same thing?
Imagine you're buying food that will go bad tomorrow. You can't keep it. You can't share it. You can buy enough food to fill you up today for $5, or enough food to fill you up 50x for $20. You will still eat that one unit of food, the other 49 units will just go to waste. Which do you buy?
For all the time I've had Mint, I've saved nearly $3,000 compared to your $50/mo plan. I've never felt the urge to really need more data personally, and it's worked well for me on my international travels around North America. If the outcome was the same, wouldn't you rather keep $3k in your pocket?
I have it in my home, but I live in the center of a major city. It just speedtested at 476.64 Mbps down, though I think I've seen 650+ in the past, but I might be mis-remembering that.
However, I only get 5G mmwave (indicated as "5GuW" on the phone) on my work phone.
The carrier I use for my personal phone charges an extra $20/month for 5G, and I don't care that much, so I leave it at 4G LTE.
Edit: Just re-tested and got 767 Mbps.
C-Band spectrum also makes sense given a speed test of 400-800Mbps. That's fast, but not hugely faster than what you should expect with really good coverage today. T-Mobile experiences speeds above 560Mbps 25% of the time. Verizon's 5GUW (which is mostly C-Band) experiences speeds above 620Mbps 25% of the time. You ran two speed tests and got 477Mbps and 767Mbps. One of those is pretty average for C-Band and one of those is quite good for C-Band (25% faster than the 75th percentile), but nothing too out of the ordinary.
Those are speeds that are relatively common when carriers have around 150MHz of 2.5-5GHz spectrum deployed in your area and you have good signal and not too much congestion.
mm wave does exist, but the coverage is often a block or two with indoor coverage being really spotty. C-band coverage will be measured in square miles. C-Band won't have the coverage that lower frequencies have, but it's a lot more practical to deploy than mm wave. mm wave shines when you have a small, high-value area where you want to deploy 1,000MHz+ of capacity. Carriers might have 50MHz of capacity around 800MHz, 90MHz of capacity around 1.9GHz, 150MHz of capacity around 4GHz, and 1,000MHz of capacity around 30GHz. That really high frequency mm wave won't cover a large area, but there's a lot of it. If you're looking to cover a sports stadium, it makes sense. If you're looking to cover people's homes (even in major cities), C-Band is going to get you really good speeds with coverage that will be a lot more usable.
It's possible that you're getting mm wave, but those speeds are pretty normal for good C-Band coverage. The first test is pretty average and the second test is quite good, but nothing extraordinary.
Chinese cities, especially at train stations and the surrounding area get really impressive flows of people every day. But even in China I would expect that while they might have a lot more 5G SA when in the US, that the radios are actually mid band and not millimeter wave for most coverage. You still get higher capacity and low latency, but most people probably don't notice the low latency, except maybe Chinese autonomous taxis faking it till they make it.
For a while I had my phone stick to 3G, which doesn’t support emergency alerts, because my jurisdiction kept sending them out for joint custody disputes at 3AM 1000km away. It was fine But the 3G became unbearable and they tightened up the alert criteria.
Not necessarily for 4G to 5G. 5G can run a 4G compatible control channel and timeslices can be 4G or 5G.
> Usually the most penetrating frequencies (ie lowest) are kept on the lower G to maximize legacy support.
Maybe, but at least in the US, 4G wad deployable on new lower frequency spectrum that had previously been used for TV. LTE 71, 600 Mhz is lower frequency but wouldn't have been usable for 3G because legacy phones didn't use those frequencies.
These tricks are less common in Germany though, as far as I’ve seen, so seeing 5G can serve as a weak proxy for “the carrier has at least touched this base station in the last few years”, which increases the chance they’ve upgraded its spectrum or backhaul a little bit.
Really depends on the concrete situation, though. Having a small 4G cell with 20 MHz of spectrum to yourself beats an overloaded large 5 MHz rural 5G site any day.
In Norway, Telia shut down 2G in 2025, but Telenor is holding out until the end of 2027.
In Sweden, Telia is holding until 2027, and all other telcos have already switched it off.
France is shutting down 2G this year.
So the 2G shutdown is a real thing.
I do not give a shit if I can download at 500mbps while resting my phone on a wireless router. I need to be able to USE it.
Ive switched my entire home internet setup to 5G and haven't had an outtage in two years. Whereas it was once a week with fiber. I also can fallback with duel sims.
5G has legitimately changed my quality of (digital) life.