Study Claims 40 Percent of UK 5G Mobile Connections are Really 4G
New research from SignalTracker, which runs a popular Android mobile app (but not iOS) for monitoring and examining mobile phone reception, appears to show that although your handset may say 5G, it frequently only has a 4G connection. In UK samples, when the 5G icon was displaying, 38% of tests were in fact found to be a 4G connection.
“This is because most phones show 5G when the base station to which they are connected has 5G equipment potentially available. The actual connection may be 4G or 5G,” said the study. “On some phones the icon becomes more distinct when an actual 5G connection is made, but on other phones the same icon is shown whether 5G is merely available or whether it is actually connected.”
The issue described upon is indeed a familiar one, although until now we haven’t seen any UK studies that have attempted to examine how much of an impact it makes. “Actual 5G is about twice as fast [mobile broadband] as icon-only connections, averaging 49Mbps as against 27Mbps in our tests,” said the report.
Advertisement
The results come from all the UK mobile networks, but SignalTracker said displaying the 5G icon when there is only a 4G connection is “more common with some operators than others“. For example, for Three UK, the 5G icon means real 5G some 94% of the time and for Vodafone the figure is 93%. But for O2, only 66% of 5G tests had a genuine 5G connection, and surprisingly for EE it was just 32%.
The latter is unexpected, particularly as EE generally does quite well in other surveys of 5G based data performance and its coverage is often regarded as being quite strong.
Managing Director, Martin Sims, said:
“This issue is not being clearly explained to consumers. Achieving a 5G connection everywhere may not be possible and most people will accept this. But the public deserve clear information about what they are getting.
Mobile networks are an amazing engineering achievement. The best way to get public support for optimising this incredible technology is to keep them fully informed.”
The figures quoted come from over 11,000 tests carried out by PolicyTracker over the past two months, using the SignalTracker service.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« Firefighters Called to Blaze at BT’s Adastral Park Research Site UPDATE
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message. By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
Does this not count as mis-selling and call for a class-action lawsuit?
Those don’t even exist in the UK.
But we might have more luck with case with the advertising standards agency. But more than likely they would say it’s ok like they said calling copper broadband “fibre” was ok
Not a shock, 5G is rubbish, so I expect the phone changes to 4G to get a decent signal. If I get a phone with 5G, I will disable 5G as it is a waste of time.
5g is not rubbish.
It is a far more versatile set of technologies than were available under 4g. You are welcome to put your head in the sand but dont expect others to be following your example.
@Fara82Light, Versatile? Until it cuts out when you enter a building.
I doubt 99% of people even realise what they are using, as long as they can do what they want to do.
That is the problem, 5G is useless when it gets between buildings or inside buildings and as yet have never lived up to the hype.
i rather keep 4G which is pretty reliable than muck around with losing signal with 5G that really I don’t need.
@Ad47uk 700MHz 5G is built to have better building penetration than 4G.
@Ad47uk:
Your claims do not match my experience.
This is further complicated by the use of 5G NSA (non-standalone) for almost all 5G connections: the phone is connected to 4G and adds a 5G channel. 5G-NSA both 4G+5G working to get 5G service.
This will improve as providers enable 5G-SA (standalone) for more locations and customers.
Never has something undelivered on its promises more than 5G! Well except 4G…and 3G when they said we would be watching live TV, downloading huge gigabit movies and other marketing nonsense that you don’t need on a mobile phone versus a reliable, robust mobile connection/signal when and where you need it the most!
I fully expect 6G to be marketed and to disappoint in exactly the same way as its predecessors…
Absolutely! 5G was originally going to deliver hundreds of megabits per second, and be an alternative to FTTP.
Although mobile speeds pale in comparison to the hype, at least 4G/4.5G/5G data turns out to be *useful*.
Yup. From ‘get a robot to give you a shave on a mountaintop’ to ‘you may be able to send a WhatsApp message but probably not’. All of the carriers need to get their license to operate put on notice until they make drastic improvements to coverage, signal strength and data speeds.
I can watch the Six Nations Cup on my iPhone using 5g while out and about in full resolution with no issues. There are a lot of people making sweeping claims that do not match up with the reality.
@Iain:
5g is delivering.
I have used a tether on my iPhone to enable broadband access for my home network while my broadband connection was down last year. In terms of performance, there was no discerable difference between the 5g connections and the broadband connection.
Iain:
5G on three does deliver hundreds of megabits as they own the biggest spectrum. If you buy a three mobile data sim on amazon and use it in a dual sim phone its far faster than 4G. Use the 2nd Three sim as your data sim and whatever network you use for voice and text you should get hundreds of megabits per second where there is coverage. I even use a 3 data sim in a 5G router and get 400+mbits in my house.
I’m sitting in a Tesco cafe and there’s a three pole across the road and a speedtest shows it’s doing 1.1 gigabit. Yep gigabit on my phone. My home WiFi doesn’t even do gigabit when have got 1gbit virgin media. I think you’re just a whinger. I don’t like it therefore itsno good and bad for everyone. Ridiculous.
@Anon Three is about the only operator with a decent 5G rollout, as can be seen from the post.
I know a few people with phones with 5G, and they are complaining about them losing signal when entering buildings or even in our city centre and there is a big space in the middle.
Would not be so bad if it was one network, but they use different networks.
My partner when she comes here have to put her phone on my Wi-Fi or turn off 5G, otherwise it keeps changing from one to the other.
Useless, I am in no rush whatsoever to get a phone with 5G.
Having lived in coutries with SA 5G, I can say it makes no difference whatsoever. Of course the rollout was going to near impossible on the U.K. landscape. No such problem for Middle Eastern countries with unlimited flat deserts.
I suspect at a U.K. government level they are sick of the claims of the communications industry and the money that has been wasted.
I switch my phone to 4G only.
The reason for this is that I don’t have any use cases on my device that requires greater speeds.
I find that switching to 4G only saves battery life as my device then doesn’t keep trying to switch between 4G and 5G.
The most taxing use case I have on my device is video streaming and that only requires 15-20Mbs, and I don’t often watch video on my thingy phone screen either.
Maybe one day there will be a use case to take advantage of the capacity that 5G brings, but for now I think it only delivers benefits to end users in congested public spaces where there are a lot of users in a small space.
I live on London and 4G tends to deliver speeds on average of 120Mbs+ on Vodafone.
So many friends and relatives are getting indian scammer call saying “6G is available in your contract upgrade now”.
I have a Samsung phone which is on EE. The 5G icon is solid white when connected to proper 5G and hollow 5G icon when it’s really connected to 4G, I also use NetMonitor Pro for more technical details. From my experience in a more rural area, I rarely encounter proper 5G.
Sadly this con hasn’t been picked up more widely. This article may be useful and goes into more technical details.
https://www.lightreading.com/5g/your-5g-icon-is-virtually-meaningless
Hahahahahahahah the baconator isn’t going to be happy about this one.
Allera statement incoming…
I would like to point out, Samsung phones show transparent and filled 5G icons which does indicated if its actually connected to 5G or not.
I have also experienced Exynos powered Samsung phones to struggle with Nokia 5G RAN. Where it refuses entirely to connect.
Sitting in Tesco,eating my Greggs, I turn off the WIFI and use the “5G” as it has better band width and reliability to the saturated wifi 6. As I usually watch sport my phone. I’m happy to say it WORKS!
I consistently get speeds in the region of 60Mbps to 75Mbps when I travel about on EE. The device never seems to be off 5g now.
My nearest mast was converted to 5G recently. Since then it’s been almost impossible to get enough signal to make a voice call even in the garden, let alone inside
Three is the best as it has so much spectrum, holding 140MHz and 20MHz in the 3.4GHz and 3.6-3.8GHz bands respectively. In comparison EE has 40MHz and 40MHz and O2 has 40MHz and 0MHz, so they end up at the bottom of the pile.
spectrum does not have any play in this whatsoever
O2 has a full 80MHz block … They just make awful decisions and refuse to use it, well not all of it at least.
I done a speed test on my so called 5g after turning the WiFi off at home. The speed test results were
Drum roll
5.69mbps
Not 50.69
5.69mbps on Sky.
Absolutely garbage
This is interesting.
Most Samsung phones show a transparent 5G icon if the base station has 5G available but is connected to 4G.
The icon turns fully white when it’s actually connected to 5G.
When 5G was rolling out a few years ago, the icon was usually transparent, but now it’s mostly white. I live in London though so I guess this is expected.
I’ve noticed something bizarre with EE and maybe Vodafone; when the phone is idle and isn’t using too much bandwidth, it switches to the transparent icon. When I start using the phone and watch videos, the icon turns white.
I know iPhones have a power saving feature for 5G but Samsung phones don’t have this feature so that’s why I got confused.
I was told and confirmed this four years ago on a training course. Vodafone staff were there and admitted that 4g cells were being renamed as 5g to fool the public into thinking they had 5g, and also to fool shareholders and big wigs. Said it was an easy way to get promised funding for expansion was to bullshit the bosses with rigged figures.
Forgot to add — why do you think they won’t release nbiot and lte mast locations??? Because if the bosses and shareholders seen how bad the rollout has been they would pull funding etc. not just coda, but also O2 etc etc
I didn’t know this but it is no suprise to me. I am in a small town and speeds on EE are the same on 4G or 5G, 100mbit with 40-80ms ping so no complaints.
I mostly have 5G disabled as I prefer the reliability of 4G over the speed of 5G.
Luxury, in suburban NW London, lucky to get 7Mb weekday evenings, sometimes as low as 3Mb, 20Mb at 02:00 in the early morning, and 15Mb at weekends. Ping’s OK at 30Ms, but upload rates frequently exceed download suggesting over-subscription effecting the back-haul ?
Lets guess.. . .the providers and phone manufacturers are all going to be wheely, wheely, sorry and lessons will be learned.And they’ll be no compo offered.
“Getting it right first time, every time” needs to be adopted by the telecommunications and computer industry as a mantra.
I suppose, they’re doing that at the moment, but, that said, it always benefits the shareholders and managers and rarely benefits the customers.
Tail wagging dog.
My 4g+/5g service is terrible. Despite the signal being really strong, I get so much cell tower hopping, apps just think I’m not connected
During testing, I’ve had latency showing nearly 11 seconds. (Not a typo, it peaked at 10800ms), and a throughput of 4mbps
EE tell me there’s nothing they can do, even though if I test at 5am, a get 100mbps, and 100 yards down the road I get 300+mbps
There is a site nearby they are supposed to have serviced, but the haven’t and the next nearest has a line of site issue.
Uk’s 5G would of been good if the ISPs were allowed to use Huawei kit like other countries
I think O2 are the most prone to lie ones around. I was sadly on them for a while and even full 5G bars was giving 15-20mbit.
I was dual SIM and 3 would give me 500+.
When I had my heart attack I was barely getting 2mbit with O2, my bros bought me a 3 SIM and I was getting 900mbit by the window and 500+ in bed.
Say what you want about three but their speeds and 5G coverage has always been brilliant for me. O2 though, bunch of liars.
Is this not explained by the “5G On” and “5G Auto” options in iOS? From Apple:
Choose how your iPhone uses the 5G network, which can affect battery life.
5G Auto: Enables Smart Data mode. When 5G speeds don’t provide a noticeably better experience, your iPhone automatically switches to LTE, saving battery life. The 5G icon appears based on the configuration of the carrier network, and in rare cases, may appear even when 5G coverage is not available.
5G On: Always uses 5G network when it’s available. This might reduce battery life.
LTE: Uses only LTE network, even when 5G is available.