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When presenting your first 5G phones on Tuesday, Apple said it had tested them on more than 100 networks. That’s a significant achievement, because 5G operates through a confusing mosaic of frequencies, which means Apple had to pack extra chips, RF filters, and multiple antennas into the iPhone 12.
The road to 5G has been less impressive than advertised so far, paved with meh speeds and spotty coverage, largely because the technology is so fragmented.
5G is “a zoo of different technologies,” says Swarun Kumar, assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University and director of its Emerging Wireless Technology Laboratory. “There is a standard, but it can be interpreted in different ways.”
Apple went out of its way to sell people on the potential of 5G by introducing its new phones, showing how it could make a smartphone behave like a game console by unloading computing. But wireless technology is still in its infancy.
Apple’s support for 5G on its four new iPhones “is really unusual,” says Ian Fogg, vice president of analytics at Opensignal, a UK company that tracks wireless network performance. He notes that only the largest Android devices tend to support the high-speed flavor of 5G.
The 5G was probably destined to disappoint at first, given the hype surrounding it. The standard promises data transfer speeds reaching 10 gigabits per second, 100 times faster than 4G speeds, as well as latencies of 1 millisecond compared to 50 milliseconds in 4G; it also allows many more devices to connect to a network simultaneously.
Just as 4G enabled a new generation of smartphone applications that fueled economic growth, the hope is that developers will create new services in 5G. In addition to giving smartphones superpowers, the technology could eventually connect autonomous cars, industrial machinery, medical devices, and smart toasters to the cloud. 5G has also become geopolitical football as countries compete to take the lead in its implementation.
However, so far, 5G has yet to live up to expectations.
The 5G wireless standard is designed to take full advantage of different parts of the wireless spectrum. The standard covers multiple frequency bands, but the main segments are low-band and mid-band frequencies below 6 gigahertz, and ultra-wideband or millimeter wave frequencies above 24 gigahertz. As a general rule of thumb, lower frequencies offer more range but lower speeds, while higher frequencies provide super fast speeds but only cover a few hundred meters and are highly susceptible to interference. Getting the most out of 5G means using a combination of all these frequencies.
So far, US network providers have only offered a few segments of 5G spectrum. T-Mobile and AT&T have focused on the mid and low frequencies, providing greater coverage but speeds slightly above 4G. Verizon has primarily offered ultra-wideband 5G, providing download speeds of nearly one gigabit per second, but only in very small areas of downtown. Overall, the US lags behind many other countries in terms of average data speeds for 4G and 5G, according to an October report from Opensignal.
At Apple’s event Tuesday, Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said the company would roll out 5G nationwide. This will run at low frequencies, which means less dramatic speed increases but wide coverage. The company says this will involve technology that allows 4G and 5G users to share the same spectrum.
Picture is tricky in the US because only a limited amount of midband frequency is available, offering a good mix of speed and range. However, that will change in the coming years. The US government recently auctioned off a portion of the midband and announced that it would make more available through another auction.
