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UK 5G not true 5G for broadband

zakir1988

ULTIMATE Member
I have Three network 5G broadband they give huawei cpe pro as you guys know my area is not officially confirmed to have 5G but I get 5G signal to the hub.

Why is UK networks not using mmwave and using sub 6.

UK is always slow then other countries.
 
Itis true 5G, just not standalone.
Other countries have probably other interests and considerents.
 
Because this is the UK is your answer Zakir. Its a half hearted attempt at 5g for good marketing, nothing else. If 5g ever makes 1GB/s here I'll be impressed. It would if the carriers put the correct amount of infrastructure in place to support these wild new technologies, but in reality they don't want too, because they can't compete with the cabled providers over the air.
 
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Yes to move to proper 5G then it will require a revamp of mast sites (not just existing) and a lot more backhaul. We also need effective UK spectrum allocation.

5G phones are still expensive and only selected premium models can currently support mmWave. So even if the network was there only a handful would be able to use it. Verizon customers with mmWave only experience base LTE speeds. It has to be a complete system.
 
So its utterly pointless even going down a half-assed 5g route currently IMHO. Its like buying a "HD-ready" TV that only does 720p, its a nice ornament to show off at the time to your techy friends, but isn't anywhere near as good a a full 1080p OLED.
 
Wait until you learn about DSS (Dynamic Spectrum Sharing) - Vodafone are deploying it now, and the other providers will next year too.
It actually reduces the capacity for 4G users and hampers the speeds of 5G to 4G speeds.

It's somewhat designed as a stop-gap to deliver 5G more widely, to cater for the growing base of handsets that have 5G now, but really, marketing.

Verizon were effectively cornered into deploying it as it was the only spectrum they had to be able to keep up with the 5G 'revolution'. However when the mid-band auctions happen in the US next year expect Verizon to stop blowing the mmWave trumpet.

mmWave 5G was never going to be widely deployed, anywhere in the world - it's really only going to be deployed in very population dense places like stadiums, main train stations, perhaps festivals etc - covid has pretty much stopped the need for mmWave in the UK, temporarily at least.

Given that you can block the mmWave signal with your hand sub-6 (and our 'normal' low-band frequencies - including 700mhz next year) are the only sensible ones to use when attempting to cover larger areas with a continuous 5G layer.
For sure speeds wont get anywhere near mmWave but physics is responsible for that.
 
The fact voda thought it wise to actually use the phrase "5G built right" really doesn't fill me with confidence Gavin! :)

so they're going with 5g is >100Mbps now........ *Picard face-palm meme*
 
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Here's an idea Vodafone, why not just ditch 5g investment altogether and deliver 4g properly @ 100Mbps?? Wouldn't it be far cheaper!
 
5G is the new milking cow, at least from a marketing pov.
 
mmW is pretty useless for economically viable mobile comms (better for fixed wireless) and is generally only deployed in dense urban areas, such as around shopping areas, airports etc. You wouldn't build an mmW network with truly wide coverage in the UK unless you had a lot of money to blow (waste) on it. The signals are too weak to be useful without a very dense network.

In the UK you will see 5G speeds improve next year as more bands become available via Ofcom, with mmW probably following further down the road and most likely only via very limited / targeted urban coverage. Standalone 5G will also become more common.
 
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It feels to me that perhaps your expectations of 5G are the peak/headline speeds that have been produced in testing, rather than what that translates to when it gets deployed in the real world with constraints on owned/deployed spectrum and potential hundreds/thousands of simultaneous users with differing devices of different specifications.

While the 5G headline speeds are great to highlight the possibilities, they certainly won't be what are seen widely when the user-base with 5G capable devices increases (arguably the 5G network should become more dense at the same too, balancing that somewhat).
Similar to what we see with 4G today - headline speeds are multi-hundred, but in some places its single digits!

Something like this sees this play out in the real world:

And this is an article from April 2016 for 4G:
Three has managed to boost its average 4G LTE download speed from 12Mbps to 18.7Mbps—a statistical tie with EE, which is sitting on 17.8Mbps. This is almost certainly due to Three ploughing more spectrum into its LTE network in the back half of 2015. Vodafone and O2 share a distant third place at around 12Mbps.
Compared to the Oct 2020 OpenSignal results
Download speed (4G):
O2: 18.2
Voda: 22.4
Three: 22.2
EE: 36.4

It doesn't seem like they've come very far (other than EE), but considering the growth of devices, data usage, increase of various cloud-based services the providers are keeping up with and delivering beyond the usage increases (overall). Though as ever, there are caveats - there will be certain sites/locations that don't progress/change and so appear to have got slower.
 
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Standalone 5G will also become more common.
SA 5G is where the benefits of 5G will show (low latency/higher capacity per node) however the software/firmware that enables VoNR (on both RAN and UE sides) is still being developed so its likely SA will launch without VoNR capability. Meaning you'll still fall back to 2G, 3G (if not turned off) or 4G (if have a VoLTE device) to make a call or send a text. *Picard face-palm meme*
 
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