last time we partnered with t-mobile on a video about 5g you guys had some fair
questions so we're back again sponsored by t-mobile to address them and shed
some more light on the current state of 5g it's the weekend of this
oh no i can't the massive contest
and thousands of people are going to be converging on the stadium behind me some
of them equipped with 5g phones naturally
i am one of them so i've actually got 5g
devices from both t-mobile and one of their competitors and i'm going to be
checking out what the 5g coverage looks like here in the miami area so t-mobile
is using a combination of their low-band 600 megahertz 5g and millimeter wave
while their competitor's rollout is focused entirely on millimeter wave that
should give us great speeds but i suspect we're gonna run into some of the
same signal drop issues that we did last time around behind us is one of the
event spaces for the big contest so we think that millimeter wave 5g has been
really juiced up in this area so we're going to go ahead and cold and i are
each going to walk walk until we drop our signal our 5g signal we're just
walking together all right so if it picks up again you're allowed to keep
walking you better watch out for these buildings Colton
see you Colton nice knowing you Colton you want
something to eat Colton Colton want something to eat and grab you something
bring it back i'm coming back i'm coming back for you
you know what the thing about old technology is
it's always getting in the way of progress so i'm using my phone using my phone
think maybe i'll relax in this very comfortable chair here
ah see you 5g was nice knowing you
now let's try our 5g being blocked by
nothing i was standing here a second ago and it just went from 5g to 4g now last
time in new york i ended up filming my video just a few days before t-mobile
lit up their nationwide 5g network covering over half of the us population
so i was only able to show how a millimeter wave only 5g network behaves
it's now you see it now you don't quite literally almost any object
between the phone and the tower drops you back to 4g
well now let's take a look at what happens on t-mobile's low band 5g
hold on where was exactly the spot where the other one dropped i think it was like here
here here still got it
my two phones here uh-oh got that glass in the way
oh and the millimeter waves are gone
t-mobile 5g is still working though
still got it so this is fantastic we've had 5g
basically everywhere we've gone today on t-mobile but the funny thing is compared
to 4g lte we're not getting otherworldly
speeds like it's good we're over 100 megabit but it's not insane that is
where some of the confusion came from last time around a ton of hype
surrounding 5g has been hyper focused on these blazing fast speeds i mean even we
got swept up by it you know wow look at this mobile internet speed in excess of
what most people can get to their homes it's crazy
but 5g is a lot more than just
speed millimeter wave so the high band frequencies between 20 gigahertz and 100
gigahertz is an exciting new component
of 5g because that spectrum wasn't already being used for anything carriers
could just jump right into it bond together a huge number of channels and
then give you these insane download speeds in excess of one gigabit per
second but there's a reason no one was using it that performance and in fact
any connection at all can only be achieved over short distances and within
direct line of sight so i mean in a large stadium or a concert hall where
tons of people are taking videos and sharing them with each other it's a
complete game changer but the thing is that even within a single building it's
very challenging to get perfect coverage so millimeter wave needs something else
to fall back on oh and of course it's basically useless
to anyone who lives outside of the select areas where it has decent
coverage in the last video i explained that t-mobile planned to achieve a
mixture of broad coverage high speeds
and strong penetration power for indoor use by using high band so that's
millimeter wave their existing low band and the mid band spectrum that they're
planning to acquire in the future and the comments got absolutely flooded with
this comment or some variant thereof so
here we go 5g means 5th gen and it's not
bound to a particular frequency range
low band 5g is 5g mid band 5g is 5g and
high band 5g is 5g
as long as your device is equipped with a 5g nr or new radio and your carrier is
using the same frequencies that your phone supports you are on 5g
the big picture benefits looking into the future of 5g include lower latency
which is essential for the future of autonomous cars better handling of dense pockets of
users like at the massive sports ball competition and then
of course faster speeds using 5g versus 4g on the same spectrum
at the same width should yield some improvement but it just isn't the main
point however like any new technology early adopters are going to have to wait
a little while to see the full benefit so you shouldn't be surprised to see
multiple 4g bands bonded together
outperforming an early 5g deployment especially in terms of a basic speed
test run 5g is going to keep continually
getting better if you're going to take anything away from this video it should
be this if all you're after is faster video downloads there's no reason to
throw away a perfectly good 4g device today but
this is one of those times where if you are in the market for a new phone you
should be looking at the future-proof option t-mobile's 5g network has massive
low band coverage today with other bands coming soon so thanks again to t-mobile
for sponsoring this video if you guys enjoyed this one you can check out the previous one where we were walking
around new york i'll see you guys later