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In July, I recently scoured the Verizon 5G UW (Ultra Wideband, Verizon’s marketing moniker for mmWave 5G) coverage area near downtown Denver, Colorado to clearly identify if it’s probably Verizon carrier locked. I told you. Yes, the Google Pixel 4a 5G did exactly as advertised.As already shared, actually carrier unlock 4a 5G, so it only supports low band 5G. But there’s a lot more to this story, so in this follow-up post, I’ll touch on topics in order, such as:
- Why did you first think it was an even number? more Service constraints than it ended
- Why Verizon 5G UW was so hard to track in the first place
- How low-band (also known as sub-6) 5G performance compares to 4G LTE, and
- How AT&T and T-Mobile Can Compete Verizon in 5G
When I got and activated my Pixel 4a (5G) (moving from the Pixel 3a whose 3-year support warranty from Google was about to expire) the business week before the weekend of testing, and shortly after, I was on the silicon I was in the ballet. At my organization’s annual public meeting, the Embedded Vision Summit. Specifically, the conference was held at the Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. I spent one night at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara next door (both already shared and just west of the sometimes noisy Levi’s Stadium).
While setting up the phone at my home office, I never saw an active “5G” indicator on the phone, which was no surprise. I live in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in the countryside just west of Golden, Colorado, where I feel lucky to even have (somewhat erratic) LTE service. But I was also surprised that Denver International Airport only had LTE connectivity (holding off on that idea). And I was 5G only in both hotels and convention centers, I was guessing it was Silicon Valley where 5G UW is prevalent. I never saw his 5G UW indicator on the phone display (again, at the time I didn’t know about 5G UW specific service limits).
But I later found out that my Silicon Valley 5G UW speculation was not. very right. Here’s a coverage map of the Santa Clara, California area from his website on Verizon:
5G UW looks abundant, right? Now that you’ve seen all the hotels and convention centers (including Levi’s Stadium), let’s zoom in. North Santa Clara:
My hotel was on the east side of Great America Parkway across from Bunker Hill Lane (the light pink vertical rectangle is roughly where the hotel is). The convention center was directly south of the hotel. It’s all low-band 5G areas.on my phone had Even if it was 5G UW ready, it would never be able to take advantage of the 5G UW network. Equally interestingly, Levi’s Stadium (home to concerts as well as home games of the San Francisco 49ers pro American football) is located just east of San Thomas Aquino Creek and just south of West Tasman Drive. Also Low-frequency 5G dedicated area. One might think that if Verizon wants to show off its new 5G UW network, it’s going to prioritize places with 68,500 seats, but I don’t think so.
Back in Colorado, I chose Sloane Lake, three miles due east of Denver’s central business district, as my test site.
I didn’t see the 5G UW indicator on my phone, so I realized the phone wasn’t advertised. But since it was there anyway, the low-band he decided to do a 5G bandwidth test instead. Here are the speed test results:
I was surprised at how low it was (i.e. reminiscent of LTE), so I repeated the test using the FCC’s app (oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to recognize the latest generation of cellular technology yet). It reported the message “Your internet connection: 4G (LTE)”, but you can see from the top right corner that I was actually using 5G):
But here things got For real strange. On a whim, in the process of driving home, I decided to take another screenshot while driving 50 mph on LTE on Hwy 6 in Golden, Colorado (yes, I had my phone on while driving). I was using it… sorry). Let’s see the result:
Latency and jitter were high, but that’s to be expected since it was running (pretty fast) at the time.but i got way In particular, download speeds were fast despite using the “old” LTE and the “new” low-band 5G. A few days later while standing still in Evergreen, Colorado (at the grocery store, if I remember correctly) I repeated the LTE test…again noticeably higher downstream bandwidth, this time upstream bandwidth Higher Width, Lower Latency and Jitter:
If you zoom out of Verizon’s coverage map, you can see why they had to be so picky about choosing where to do their 5G UW testing (it’s Sloan’s Lake at the western edge of the scattered bright red 5G UW footprint. ).
Zooming out even further, you can see how limited the range is even Verizon’s low-band 5G rollout at this point.
frankly that Data questionable. The black and white location marker west of Denver is where I live.I I never have 5G is active here. In fact, without femtocells, getting cellular voice or data coverage is hit and miss. all.
Enough Verizon bashing. What about AT&T, the other carrier in use (for personal phone lines, versus his Verizon for work)?The situation here is good news/bad news by comparison. Check out our low-band 5G network footprint.
There is one modifier here.I can not do it absolutely AT&T’s ‘5G’ confirms it’s not Also Including 4G LTE Advanced (AT&T marketers mislabeled it as 5GE instead of 5G Evolution). After receiving criticism from the National Advertising Review Board in 2020, AT&T promised to stop using his 5GE terminology in advertising, but existing phones continue to display misleading notices. It is unclear whether the reorientation extends to coverage map claims.
However, if you click on the pop-up to see where AT&T currently offers “5G+” service (AT&T, unlike Verizon, bundles C-band, or mid-band, and mmWave 5G under the same “5G+” umbrella). are available).will find only you single The entire Denver-area location, ball arena, and home to (among other things) the Denver Nuggets Pro Basketball Team, the 2022 Stanley Cup-winning Colorado Avalanche Pro Hockey Team, and the Colorado Mammoth Pro Lacrosse Team. Apparently AT&T, unlike Verizon, good The idea of prioritizing locations that can accommodate 20,000 people when showing off shiny new high-speed 5G UW networks is a bit moot because the same people won’t be able to use the same networks elsewhere. …
Finally, what about T-Mobile? Let’s see:
Wow. This graphic clearly shows why the carrier was so ambitious to integrate with Sprint. Sprint already had access to the rich C-band spectrum (and even better, the mid-band spectrum No (right next to frequencies used by aircraft avionics systems), T-Mobile was able to redeploy relatively quickly for 5G purposes. C-band 5G is faster than low-band 5G and offers better range and premises penetration capabilities than mmWave 5G. The C-band is very likely to finally deliver on the promise of 5G’s long-standing upgrade, with T-Mobile taking the lead in implementing it, at least for now.
However, keep your enthusiasm in check as the carrier offers other tricks. Again, for example, if your AT&T locked phone says it’s on the “5G Evolution” network, it’s not real 5GAlso, as already mentioned, Verizon only supports 5G UW (mmWave). carrier lock A version of the 5G-enabled Google Pixel smartphones, these smartphones are priced at a premium to comparable unlocked prices. Verizon (and his partner Google) has also refused to enable support for his C-band on his traditional 5G phones. Even if the wireless subsystems of those phones support the relevant mid-band frequency range…and I’d bet on that. Any C-band support, like mmWave support, is only offered on carrier-locked phones. AT&T is doing the same, breaking previous promises in the process. Ha.
Dear readers, how was your 5G experience so far? Make some noise in the comments!
—Brian Dipert is Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, Senior Analyst at BDTI, and Editor-in-Chief of the company’s online newsletter, InsideDSP..
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