I signed up for a 5G contract in September of 2019. It was an exciting day as the phone I was going to use was the original one from the company, and I was about to start using it.
Two years later, I know that one of the technologies would reveal itself to be exciting, enjoyable, and beneficial, while the other would turn out to be a waste of time and money.
I fell in love with the foldable phone, despite its flaws, but 5G has barely made a difference in my life, and I won't be using it on my phone in December 2021.
Pointless?
I will point out that my experience won't mirror your own. You may have better coverage in your area, and you may have traveled more. It will be hard to name a specific benefit that came from 5G, even if you have a 5G phone.
The first time I saw the 5G symbol was on my phone. It has stayed in my mind because I didn't get to experience 5G when I was connected to the network I paid for monthly. I had just gotten off a flight to Japan and was standing in the airport in Tokyo, using a Japanese sim I had purchased for use during my stay. I didn't get a 5G signal again after I left the airport as 5G wasn't prevalent in Tokyo at the time.
The fact that I had to travel thousands of miles before 5G showed up on my phone set the tone for my use. I knew that my area didn't have 5G, but I thought it was a good chance that my network operator would have better coverage than I did.
There is still no 5G coverage there more than two years later. A town about 20 minutes away has a 5G signal. If I travel into London, which is about 90 minutes away, then 5G will show up more often, but it is not always. I discovered this when I did a 5G phone test in another town. I was told by a chip maker that the phone may not have been using a 5G connection at all, despite the 5G logo on all the phones.
Do I think 5G will come to my phone soon? My closest 5G location is a city about 30 minutes away by car, according to my carrier. I don't expect 5G to arrive in the near future if this is the best it can do with 4G, a technology that has been around since 2012 I will now explain that it doesn't matter.
The 5G and the Pandemic.
The coronaviruses epidemic happened barely six months into my 5G contract. I am willing to give 5G a break for it not having much impact on my life during 2020, but I will only give it the benefit of the doubt. It seemed like a great opportunity for networks and companies to show what 5G could do for services like virtual reality and video conferencing, but we got nothing.
I went out of my way to get a signal on more than one occasion and have visited more places in the year 2021. I couldn't list a single benefit from it being there, or one service, app, or experience that I had.
Digital Trends is by Julian Chokkattu.
There is nothing to do with 5G. It is early days and benefits will start to arrive in the future, I would have said in 2019. That was what we were being sold. I can't recommend a thing to do with 5G on your phone that will demonstrate how superior it is to 4G, let alone something so cool that it will blow your mind.
You can run a speed test and know that the numbers on the screen will be a bit higher than the ones on a 4G phone. It is not that much faster to download an app or a show from the internet than it is to download it from a phone. The modem, phone, and network all have to sort out the signal before a download kicks in, which negates the supposed speed benefit over just downloads with 4G.
There is nothing to do with 5G.
In 2021, 5G will allow you to scrub through a video with very little lag, websites will appear instantly, and files will download quickly most of the time. I saw this when I first tested 5G in the U.K. and Monaco in the summer of 2019. It is not a big ask to expect something more than this.
I have paid for 5G for two years, so I don't think it's asking too much for it to appear on my phone once in a while, or to have something specific to try out when it does. I have been hearing about how amazing 5G will be for a long time. At the Mobile World Congress, which was held in February, the company gave attendees a glimpse at how user-centered 5G networks will transform our homes, cars, cities and more.
It said 5G would allow us to live in smart cities where 5G was fitted inside street lamps, and that it would allow us to move around in self-drive cars while watching high-definition movies inside. At the time, it was written that a large portion of the 5G technologies that will enable the services being introduced at this year's MWC are already at the commercialization stage.
Some of these improvements required the wide adoption of Fixed Wireless Access networks, and didn't give a time frame for its predictions. FWA is still very much a work in progress three years after the presentation, with the benefits only discussed as possibilities for the future. In the US in 2021, the mean speed for mobile networks is 39 milliseconds. Still a long way to go.
The GSMA put together a paper on the economic benefits of 5G services in the same year. The year when 5G is expected to begin displaying a measurable impact on growth is predicted by it. It is two years away, but the loudest voice in the space is still talking about the benefits that sound like science fiction. Have you used 5G-driven augmented reality to view real-time player information at a sports event? No, me not.
I am sure it will happen one day, but Opensignal's mid-2021 5G performance report showed that even for those people who do have access to a 5G signal, they would be connected to it less than 1% of the time. You could change the published date on the reports without fear of them reading like old news.
I have been happy to have 5G on my phone. The following two years would have been the same if I had stayed with a 4G contract. 5G has been a complete waste of time and money, and any advantage to having it, and I hope that one day it will be available for me to use or even test out.
Almost all phones that cost more than $250 have a 5G modem inside, and almost all phone contracts come with 5G data. As the technology has become mainstream, the days of paying a premium for 5G seem to have passed. We are still waiting for a reason for 5G to exist, so this is a very good thing.
Editors' recommendations
