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Many parts of the world are in a state of total lockdown, many projects have been put on hold and it’s for good reason. For countries that are seeing infrastructure upgrades, there is definitely going to be significant delays. I got my hands on a Shiny new 5G phone, the Samsung S20 ultra recently. I’ll be talking about that a little bit later in another post. Depending on location, the rollout of 5G technology is very different but it’s definitely coming. Various bands offer speed and coverage trade-offs depending on the environment. Regardless of configuration at the moment however, the 5G market is evidently struggling when it comes to the consumer phone market. 

The big question I have to ask myself today is whether I am prepared to pay a premium for both handsets and network upgrades to gain access to theoretical speeds and latency of 5G. 5G is propped up at a theoretical top speed of 10 gigabits per second, that is damn fast. I did a quick coverage check to see what I would be getting indoors and out at my property and surrounding areas using various network providers. Infrastructure and coverage estimators work relatively well. To no surprise, 5G would offer a very weak signal outdoors, let alone indoors. 4G speeds theoretically hover around the 300Mbps but real world speeds hang at about a third of this, it’s still not the slowest slug in the race. 

With coronavirus at our doors, life is uncertain and we seek to spend less on the luxuries and more on the necessities. Right now, 5G feels like a luxury and perhaps a needless one at that. Access to a weak 5G signal may perform vastly inefficiently compared to strong 4G signal. Stability is essential. Signal loss is a big deal, phones often auto switch to find the next best signal. This is an intensive search task that seeks to make a connection. Battery life reduction is to be expected in such a scenario and since battery technology has not evolved in mobile devices just yet, I am not sure I want to sacrifice usage time for the chance of gaining blistering speeds sporadically. Many companies understand this and 4G+ is set to be the de facto choice for a while yet. 5G stands as a useful speed jump when coverage conditions are most optimum but the hype around its arrival is truly in the water cooling off. Perhaps after this pandemic is over, infrastructure will continue to mature and exciting use cases or intelligent coverage options will thrive. 

<center><b>Lockhart Tech Blogs</b>
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https://www.opensignal.com/2019/07/08/5g-boosts-the-maximum-real-world-download-speed-by-up-to-27-times-4g-users-top-speeds
https://www.verizon.com/about/our-company/5g/5g-speed-how-fast-is-5g