Hey everyone! I’m revamping my home tech setup, and 5G internet service has been getting a lot of buzz lately. Everyone’s talking about the super-fast speeds and all the possibilities, but I’m not entirely sure if it’s the right fit for me.
Here’s my situation: I’m a gamer and a streamer, and I work from home a lot, so having a reliable and blazing-fast internet connection is crucial. Right now, I’m on a 50 Mbps plan, and while the job gets done most of the time, there are occasional lag spikes during peak hours.
So, my questions for the community are:
Is 5G internet truly all it’s cracked up to be?
Does 5G require any special equipment?
Is 5G coverage widespread yet?
Is the cost of 5G worth the upgrade?
Anyone with experience using 5G at home, your insights would be greatly appreciated!
Where are you from? In the US here I’m pretty sure it’s been the standard since 2019 or something like that. Are you meaning like a cell provider 5G internet? Like Verizon 5G Home Internet? If so, when I tried it out it was pretty crap. Lol
I don’t have 5G at home but it is pretty common in my country. I do know this: it’s probably important to add which county you’re in to gather experiences; and secondly there should be coverage maps available from some government instance and/or providers. In most countries coverage is still kinda localized, and you’ll want to check your specific address.
I did have LTE home internet at some point. It was fine most of the time. I lived in a relatively busy shopping street however, and on Saturdays it would affect my connection, I assume due to how many devices were on the mast. Something to consider.
W.r.t. equipment, usually the isp will provide you with a 5G router with a sim slot that provides WiFi and some Ethernet connections.
Really depends on where you live and what your current service is. Assuming you’re talking about 5G cell service. You can get much better internet speeds than with DSL, but cable internet and even star link are usually better most of the time. I’ve seen 5G service that is comparable to cable internet, but that’s usually been in cities. Rural or even in the suburbs it’ll probably be anywhere from better than nothing to better than DSL.
This is best answered by checking the providers’ coverage maps and derating for their being marketing tools. For the rest of your questions I’d expect a lot of YMMV depending on provider and location. FWIW, where I am there’s supposed to be 5G everywhere and it works so, er, well I use WiFi as much as possible.
its also important to note that the cellphone 5g coverage map and the internet 5g coverage map are not the same map. they have tighter allocation restrictions to prevent over provisioning (at least Verizon and t mobile do this)
I use 1.5 gig internet and it’s more then enough for all the devices in our home. If you are talking about 5g for phone then that is a different story.
People need to remember that if you are in a large center that 5g for phones get eaten up pretty easily when everyone is eating that 5g pie. Sometimes 4g is faster because there isn’t as many using that type of service
No, totally not especially if you don’t live downtown or where there’s the most concentration of true 5G towers. Most carriers still use aggregated 4G and sell it as 5G.
No, your provider will sell you a modem with the proper radio on board and maybe an external antenna.
Kinda. Depends on your area and the speeds vary a lot. Where I live even starting to get away from the absolute center of downtown gets me 1/3 of the download speed and 15% less upload. Check the coverage map with your provider or see if cell towers are mapped out on the internet.
It shouldn’t be an upgrade but the new standard. If my provider asked me even 1 more cent to get 5G I’d say no.
I did not, but since we’re talking about radio waves it there are lots of variables to take into account. How close are cell towers to your house, how crowded the area is or gets over the day/weeks/months, how good the weather is (highly ionized atmosphere reduces radio tramsission range). I’m sure there are many more variables associated I can’t think of right now.
In my opinion is decent for streaming and internet browsing, not much else. If you need something with more stable performance fiber is the way to go.
My personal favorite, via a friend who was working as a network engineer: trees’ leaves can act as waveguides so, in areas with substantial deciduous canopies, coverage patterns tend to shift between leaf on and leaf off seasons. The most common complaint was loss of coverage in the fall.
Depends on how many walls you have between the 5G modem and the nearest tower. I have metal walls and personally get faster speeds on 4G than I did with 5G. And much less power draw from the modem as well.
Like others have mentioned unless you can verify you’re near a true mmWave 5G tower, you’re essentially getting 4G with slightly less latency, faster upload bandwidth and slower speeds in general if you have too many or thick walls (the 5G modem should be smart enough to fallback to 4G if it’s better)
Also using an app like Privacy Cell will show you how legit your nearest 5G tower is.
In the U.S., I’d say 90% of “5G” towers are just upgraded 4G towers and don’t utilize any of the additional security protocols 5G offers to prevent stingray and mim attacks, so it’s still not worth the upgrade imo, unless you want slightly better ping in games and faster upload
BTW mmWave is AMAZING seeing nearly equal upload and download speeds.
If 50Mbps is the max you can get wired. Than 5G might be a better option for you. It really depends on what you have available from the ISP’s in your area.
My address was limited to 50Mbps DSL. And when looking into 5G. I found that there were only 2 providers of 5G in my area one was verizon. And it was slower than 50Mbps. And the other was $200 a month for 100/60. Which i couldn’t afford. So i was stuck with DSL for a while. But eventually i got lucky and i was able to get fiber a year later.
If you are in the USA. Try looking at National Broadband Map And see what other options you might have. They don’t have all of them and some of the speeds are wrong. But I found a few options for my address i didn’t know about.
Let me guess, some overbooked cable or copper line?
My sister uses my second SIM as her 5G internet at home. It gets the job done for what her use case is, streaming. But streaming is the easiest use case there is. Streaming has buffering so latency is not important. Streaming on Netflix is also compressed to death, so as long as your bandwidth is around 25Mbit, you are good.
That leads me to something a lot of people don’t really understand. Speedtest.net is only a synthetic benchmark to an iperf3 server of your ISP. You get the bandwidth and the ping to that very close server. Speedtest does not tell you:
If you have a CG-NAT that sucks for gaming and for hosting
How good your peering is. At the launch of Cyberpunk 2077, I could download the game on GOG 100x times faster than my friend, despite me having only a 1Gbit connection and he having 10Gbit. The reason for that was the better peering to GOG servers my ISP had.
One thing most people don’t realize about 5g is there is really three systems companies us on different frequency.
Low-band: Operates on frequencies between 600 and 900 MHz, and can cover large areas.
Mid-band: Operates on frequencies ranging from 1 to 6 GHz, and can move large volumes of data.
High-band: Delivers fast speeds, but can’t travel very far.
So check what frequency the company that is offering you 5g is running and if it works well for your environment. I was living in the mountains off grid on a mid-band network with my phone connected connected to a repeater and that worked fine for most things, but I did end up moving because some of my work required a more secure connection. If security is important then you may not want to use 5g do to signal hijacking amongst other things.
I’ve recently switched to 5G as a temporary solution due to life circumstances and price. I’m getting about 230Mbps, it’s advertised up to 300 both ways. Upload is slower as usual. There’s no contract though, waiting for the fiber line to go live hopefully beginning of next year. If I end up keeping the place.
Have been gaming on the 5g, ping has been roughly 40-70ms on a good portion of games so far.
My main issue is the gateway/router they give you. IP Passthrough is conflicting with the older Asus RT AC5300.
Do I wish the connection was faster? Yup. Does it still mainly do what is needed so far? Yup.
In conclusion, I rate is somewhere on the scale between “Meh” and “Okay”.
Not really. This just uses different mirrors than speedtest.
The problem still stands, it is a synthetic benchmark.
High band isn’t a thing for 5G routers. High band is for stadiums and other high density areas. It has less than a mile coverage and almost every single obstacle (even weather) will block it.
Care to share a link?
I doubt this is a thing thanks to SSL.
If you read what I said I was runnin a repeater off my phone. And yes signal hijacking is a thing and is why no government or large companies work came/should conducted on these systems. I am not going to put up a tutorial but there plenty of info out there. I would suggest if you are not sure to research before posting so you don’t accidentally miss lead someone.
Only thing I could find about 5G was DoS which isn’t about security.
I don’t know what you mean by “Signal Hijacking”, only thing about 5G and signal Hijacking I could find was some MITM attacks which I could not care less since we have certs nowadays everywhere. BTW copper can be easily hijacked too and even fiber although not that easy. Not that any of this would be realistic since ISP would just use port mirroring on the switch since we don’t live in a cold war movie.
Large companies and government is just a cheap argument from authority and large companies do a lot of stupid stuff like password retention policies.
But hey, maybe I have a blind spot and you care to share a link or at least what you mean by signal hijacking.
5G has slices which allows secure and dedicated bandwidth to users. Think healthcare equipment that needs to be mobile and others.
I think you.mean SIM swapping/hijacking. Thats real but if you use commercial 5g routers and not your phone that shouldnt be an issue.
I know some chief architects for telecoms up here and 5g was engineered for better secuirty to allow governments and large corps to get dddicated bandwidth as needed.
And yes all telco equipment allows lawful intercept
