Don't Fall for This 5G Con Game
Beware of carriers who claim to have the biggest, fastest, or best 5G networks. The blurry distinction between 4G and 5G makes these boasts meaningless.
Photo: Avi Greengart
There's been a lot of noise recently about which 5G network is the biggest, fastest, or best. T-Mobile even sent blankets to a bunch of analysts to symbolize the extent of its low-band 5G coverage. But the speed and coverage metrics that carriers are touting don't actually mean much for phone performance in the real world.
The ridiculousness of what we call "5G" in the US recently struck me when AT&T was named "fastest 5G network" by RootMetrics. (T-Mobile received a competing designation from Ookla.) It's true that AT&T might currently have the fastest mobile network in the US. It won our Fastest Mobile Network award in 2019 and just barely lost to Verizon in 2020. But does AT&T have the fastest 5G network? AT&T is using the smallest possible amount of 5G it can—5MHz—to light up that 5G icon. I'd call it a 4G network with a thin glaze of 5G. (Editors' Note: Speedtest by Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, the publisher of PCMag.)
AT&T found itself in an unusual position last quarter, topping Verizon on new subscribers and showing lower churn. To my mind, this reflects Verizon's "race to 5G at any cost" problem: The carrier bet on performance-killing DSS for its nationwide 5G, whereas AT&T appears to have achieved more consistent performance by merely putting a 5G cherry on top of its 4G sundae.
TweetOh, and AT&T has also been giving away iPhones, which helps.
Meanwhile, T-Mobile wants to say its "nationwide" 5G coverage is greater than Verizon's. That claim carries more weight, but again, it has little to do with your phone's data speed. Verizon's nationwide DSS 5G is often no better than 4G, so does it even matter how widespread it is? AT&T's 4G and Verizon's 4G can both often be faster than T-Mobile's low-band 5G on band n71, as we saw in our 2020 drive tests.
(What T-Mobile should really be showing is the reach of its mid-band 5G, which genuinely improves performance—but the company refuses to mark mid-band on its coverage maps.)
This confusion is inherent to the nature of 5G. Part of the core 5G concept is that it doesn't replace 4G; the new tech works with the old in a beautiful mosaic. So from a technical perspective, nothing's wrong here. The problem is from a marketing standpoint: People just like bigger numbers better. It's human nature to think that "5G" is cooler than "4G." The carriers know the average person is likely to choose a mobile provider by that simple standard, so they play it up all they can.
Performance improvements could be far more useful in evaluating carriers. How many people have average speeds that are higher than 100Mbps when they didn't before? Where are people now seeing latencies under 15ms? Where has network capacity grown, letting carriers offer lower prices or new services such as wireless home internet? But you can't map these metrics directly to "4G" or "5G," so they don't make compelling soundbites.
This is all going to color how we test for our Fastest Mobile Networks project later this year. Right now, my instinct is to throw out the 4G/5G distinction entirely. What matters is data speed, not which icon is in your status bar. Am I right? Let me know in the comments.
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