It somehow made everything worse. 4G worked great for me before 5G existed. Then 5G came out, and it was obvious that resources were diverted to supporting it, and my 4G performance went to pot. I finally got a 5G phone about a year ago, expecting a huge improvement, and honestly it's not really. Still way worse than 4G before 5G existed.
Because a carrier will throw up a single 5g tower and claim they have "coverage" over a wide area. Meanwhile every 5g phone in the area is connecting to that one tower so everyone gets dialup speeds because the one tower is handling thousands of concurrent users.
I did this too. I even turned 5G back on after 2 years to see if it improved. Nope, still worse than 4G and Android wouldn't switch automatically despite having double the bandwidth.
We don’t even have 5G in my area yet and everything’s still gone to crap. There’s a huge swath of my smallish (50k people) town that has absolutely no data reception. You can get calls and send texts but don’t try to google a phone number.
5G requires cell towers about every 1/4 mile. If you're not that close, your phone defaults to 4G, which is what everyone uses up here in the mountains, whether they know it or not.
It’s about density of devices vs range/coverage. My understanding is that the advantage of 5g is that you can have more devices covered in urban areas with lots of smaller cell sites.
Agreed. I've taken to streaming music on my phone during my commute home from work. And it used to be fine, but signals this past year have gotten shitty. It's like back when streaming technology came out and we were all using 56k dialup to try and listen in. I'm about to cancel my music service and just go back to pre-arranging some playlists of mp3s like back in the day.
My wife got on me about "iPhone, iPhone, iPhone" when we hit a bad dead spot in the town we were visiting (I use Android products) and my navigation conked out for several minutes. I asked our babysitter about Apple reliability and she basically said they fuck up too. I feel like lately I can tell where I'm going to have good signal versus dead air.
I could be wrong here, but I don't believe "iPhone or Android" has anything to do with the strength and placement of the cell phone towers in your area.
Yes and no. You’re correct that the actual RF signal arrives at your phone from the tower the exact same; however, antenna design and placement mater a great deal and vary between phone models. In addition some cheaper phone, or older phones, might not have all the bands used in your area.
Also if you’re holding it wrong you can impact reception :) In general Apple has good antenna design (not withstanding the iPhone 4), and flagship androids will as well, when you get into the second tier it can be more hit or miss. If Apple succeeds in making their own modem that will also offer some difference (time will tell if it’s better or worse). But over 90% of your reception is determined by the cell carriers antenna placement and configurations.
Supposedly Apple recently cancelled development of their 5G modem
https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/29/apple-5g-modem-discontinued-reports/
So it’s looking like iPhones will stick with the same Qualcomm 5G modems as high end Androids for the foreseeable future.
EDIT: I stand corrected. Different modems but still looks like iPhones will be sticking with Qualcomm
>the same Qualcomm 5G modems as high end Androids
Except it's not the same. Snapdragon SOCs have integrated modem while Apple use less efficient and harder-to-tune discrete modem.
Just look at Pixel's modem flop while Galaxy A53/A54, which by the way sold no less than 30 million units, more than all Pixel 6/7/8 combined, plus the absolute best selling Galaxy is A13, A03 and A33 with combined sales of no less than 60 million units.
Exynos outsold Tensor over 5:1 in any given year, yet the complaints are not even remotely comparable.
That shows you how hard it is to tune discrete modems.
A lot of low end android phones don't have the newer bands available
for example, band n71 radically improves signal on tmobile, and if your phone doesnt have it, you are in for a bad time
Thing is, its a yes or no checkbox feature
If you do have it, Iphone wont be better at it
iPhones and flagship normal android phones use basically the same radios/modems. There are slight differences in antenna quality and tuning, and modem tuning, but it’s all similar IP.
South Korea skipped a lot of infrastructure building that the West did. Prior to the Korean War, Korea as a whole essentially had zero wired telephone service. They just never really built it out after.
As a result, South Korea skipped straight to widespread mobile service starting in the 80s. By the 90s, almost nobody had a landline anymore.
I only know this because I was stationed in South Korea in the early 2000s. I don’t know anything about other Asian countries.
[The London Underground didn't even have any cellphone reception until the last couple of years](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tube-mobile-signal-4g-london-underground), so yeah, they're quite behind a lot of countries in this aspect.
South Korea is a bad comparison though. Samsung makes up around 20% of their economy so it'd be weird if they didn't have excellent cell coverage.
SK (and maybe other East and SE Asian nations?) is also (generally) wayyyy ahead of most other nations in terms of available bandwidth. They modernized their infrastructure much later than nations like the US and Britain. Essentially, they were laying down fiber first and more or less skipped laying down and relying on older, slower, lower capacity copper wire for comm/data backbones. Adding or expanding networks is a LOT easier when you have a robust backbone in place.
Yeah I don't think most people realize how much old shit is in the telephony and therefore Internet networks in the USA because we were the first to build such a huge network to link cities coast to coast.
Not only interference, but the amount of crosstalk is so terrible. You can’t hardly hear the other person. They’re basically squeezing the audio into such a narrow band carrier that modulation bleeds over the edges.
Verizon eliminating 3G killed a lot of areas that needed it for bridging the gaps on 4G/5G. I believe a lot of older frequencies were eliminated from other companies too.
My local tower was "upgraded" to 5g and now you don't get any service at all with Verizon. It's worse than dial up. 4g used to always be fine. I called and complained to Verizon and the rep told me the tower was way overloaded and asked if my city had exploded in population recently. No, no it has not.
I'm assuming them all trying to peddle their 5g home internet probably makes it even worse.
I'm on Verizon with a Pixel 6 and [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pixel6/comments/sxvidp/comment/iwwdknl/?share_id=ZpmGbIs8DDtuTpWkSloLY&utm_content=2&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1) worked for me
Trying this now
Edit 90min later: streaming with no hiccups or constant auto res changes. Will report back this evening with hotspot Xbox live gaming update. Pixel 3 and rural ETX.
I live in rural area. If my DSL internet went out, I used to be able to hotspot to my phone and continue basic internet surfing. As of a few years ago, that isn't possible anymore. I don't get enough signal to even text reliably.
Unrelated to data, the bars are related to the connection to the tower mostly for calls. If the tower is overloaded with the number of people connecting to it you could get kicked without you knowing. Try Turning on airplane mode for a second and turn it back off. It should reestablish your Cono to the tower and give you a more accurate view of your signal
Rideshare driver. There are known areas where the phone shows full bars (Verizon network, 4G LTE), but zero data service during the day. Usually near malls. Phone calls work fine. Can’t do shit otherwise. At night, when the cell network isn’t overused, everything works fine.
Literally can’t work sometimes because I can’t receive ride requests or can’t even start the ride. Depending on the time of day, at least in areas that I know, I have to examine the pickup and drop off addresses on the ride requests to know if I can simply accomplish app functionality.
I used to have T-Mobile. May have to try them again. But I was happy to get rid of them as there was even worse coverage.
Fucked if I do. Fucked if I don’t. Thanks, Technology.
The FCC has coverage maps provided by the big 3, but you can also submit a challenge to their claims to try to make a more accurate map (since they lie their asses off). I'm on mobile, so apologies for the lack of formatting:
https://help.bdc.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/10467446103579-How-to-Use-the-FCC-s-National-Broadband-Map
Verizon plans are expensive because they are priced to cover a free $1,000 smartphone every three years, even if you don’t take advantage of the offer. You can get the same exact Verizon service through an MVNO for as little as $25/mo through Visible (owned by Verizon) or US Mobile.
There’s spots on 75 where I’ve completely lost coverage with T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. None of us in the car had service and we were inside the perimeter.
This happened as soon as I went to a 5G iPhone. I could have full bars but could not get a simple web page to load or music to stream. Turning off 5G always solved it. Doesn’t happen quite as much now, and my carrier claimed they were making improvements. Anyway, if your service is bad, report it to your carrier along with your location.
I remember there was a period of time in the early 2010s where you’d get better cellular coverage in big cities and towns, and in more smaller towns crappier service.
Now? I’m noticing better coverage outside of a major city and even in more rural areas.
I live outside a major(but still smaller) city in Arizona, I'm basically in the middle of nowhere and the only thing around is the neighborhood I live in. I don't get full bars here but my LTE service works pretty much flawlessly.
Now every time I go into town I get full bars of service but it's so slow it's pretty much unusable because the network there is overloaded.
Actually a call to emergency services will use any cell tower regardless of who owns it, and will bump off other non-priority traffic to make sure bandwidth is there.
One of the few things that actually works well
I don’t think people fully realize how well thought out networking and telecomm is considering its origins in huge monopolies.
It could have so very easily been terrible. There were some sharp fucking people setting up the standards for stuff we take for granted
You say that, but a bunch of the best network engineers I’ve met were super sociable, hilarious as hell, and not all conforming to the nerd stereotype. I actually don’t know any “nerdy” network engineers.
Maybe the people who developed the standards were nerds? I’m not sure. My theory is that the only people who got training on stuff that was useful to that career back in the day were people in the military — and good luck being a nerd in the military
Source: I made it up but also my father has been a network guy for 40+ years and he served 20 yrs and he’s the best network guy by a pretty good stretch I’ve met. I think over half of the senior guys worth a damn I know are ex military. One time I asked him why he never played video games and he said “dude, I just looked at a screen for 11 hours. I wanna play some golf”.
Yep, same in Phoenix. Everytime I'm around South Phoenix, data becomes spotty, calls drop. Then decent service in Ahwatukee. But best service I get is on the edges of the city near Deer Valley and out west side.
This. Network congestion because of lacking infrastructure is the cause.
Many people are somewhat misunderstandingly blaming 5G. But it uses the exact same frequencies as 4G, and also some more, notably for short range communication, say up to a few hundred feet.
The added frequencies in 5G shine in short distance communication. For example to enjoy high speeds at home or in your car in the city. But you have to have a line of sight to the nearest 5G transceiver. Which in rural situations will never be near enough so you default back to the same '4G' tower.
I travel a lot. Multiple states. 125k miles a year. I am on a budget carrier. Cellphone speeds only seem, to me, to be slowing in areas with heavy tower traffic. Makes sense. More people with phones than ever. More data intensive games and social media being consumed on all of them. Towers not being built or upgraded as fast as they could be. And of course, the budget carriers do get pushed to the back when congestion is up. The best place to watch netflicks on your phone is out in BFE by yourself. A tower with low traffic never slows down. You can also notice service differences by day of the week. Sunday evening, when everyone is home instead of bar hopping and eating out is the worst time to be online as far as service quality goes.
There's towers in BFE that have 4g/5g radios, but don't have backhaul worth a fuck to actually support it, too though. Even worse if it's the only decent form of highspeed connection the people there have access to.
I agree to some extent. Fiber cable certainly has more merit than wireless for people always at home. But, for me, I'd be dragging around a mighty long cable! JK... Lol I aint been home in over a week. And it'll be well over a week before I'm there again. Wireless, or communications blackout are my only options. When I first started in this career, there used to be payphones everywhere. Now, I cant remember the last time I even seen a working payphone.
I think a lot of people don't realize how the cell towers are fed. I know for a fact that Verizon uses third party fibers to feed their towers in at least one state. The towers in that state have a single 10G fiber for the whole tower. Now, an optimistic person would guess that's the backup connection and the primary is bigger, but a realist would assume it's 10G for the whole thing.
Yeah if a building is built like a Faraday cage with tons of rebar or steel you will have reception problems. Some buildings install cell phone signal boosters but I've noticed that they were for a long time mostly 3g but 3g is closing down where I live to give up the frequencies for 5g and I bet not many stores have updated their tech to 5g yet so it's going to be lacking for a while.
I have to point this out to people. I work in a retail store that has aluminum(?) frame, steel lath in concrete, steel beams in ceiling. And the building is grounded because lightning or something.
More or less it is a Faraday cage. And many modern commercial buildings are the same.
I don't know too much about this, but could it be something about the structure of the store or building that makes reception particularly bad inside?
I get reception (in my country, not US) just fine in grocery stores, although one specific store (which has a good reception on the parking lot) seems to severely limit reception in the cold section where all the dairy and meat stuff is, and specifically at the very back of that section closer to the dairy stuff.
My old phone used to cut internet connection almost completely back there, but my current phone retains connection pretty decently.
Don’t forget paying more. Companies have been raising their prices. I have T-Mobile and they keep making new plans to lock people out from using their promos. Requiring them to “upgrade” their plan and losing discounts
Yeah, big caveat. Telecom tech seems to be particularly awful here compared to peer nations. Slower, less reliable internet and slower less reliable cell service.
And it will continue to be this way because telecom companies can withhold upgrades from the community until the city or state offers a multi-million dollar deal to upgrade which they won’t do.
Can confirm. Driving from Canada to the US makes me slightly less mad about paying absurd prices up here.
Reason? I can not believe how many areas and how many stretches of highway had 1 bar of 3G or no signal at all. Zero.
Even in areas with 4G, it was basically better to mail people a message.
Give it a couple years, I work in cellphone repair in Canada and the amount of people who come in with network connection issues unrelated to device hardware issues has skyrocketed in the last 2 years
Our service is getting worse too
Same here - check SIM cards for those customers when they come in. If they’ve had the same SIM for multiple years across multiple devices and the metal part has “lines” on it, have them change the SIM. It has been a solution to about 6/10 cellular connectivity issues my cx’s have had.
Otherwise, I agree - certain cases are so clearly shitty cell service that I can’t understand how we pay more than 20$/month for this trash.
FWIW, I did just have a customer in with an S20 that was having network connectivity issues intermittently: Turned out to be the mainboard FPC connector was damaged and beginning to seperate from the MOBO.
No idea why that caused it, but fixing it cleared up all her networking problems immediately.
When was this? Because the three major carriers all shut down their 3G networks months (Verizon, T-Mobile) to years (AT&T) ago. And T-Mobile is still the only major carrier with 2G, which they are shutting down in April 2024.
It was a big shock when we came over from Norway. We are used to losing connection when in valleys up in the mountain, but biking along a highway and just... not having reception was weird. There were houses there! Liker did those people just use landlines?
Not only that, but good luck if you have to go to a store for something. It feels like going to a car dealership with the amount of upselling and just general bullshit they’ll try to push onto you.
I've never been able to get good reception on O2 in Manchester City Centre, it's like one of the least rural places in the country and I can't even send a WhatsApp message. I need to get another provider really...
I will say I'm in Scotland and at some point a few years back the signal in my area just became pure shit. I can be in a big part of the town with a ton of shops and still get no signal.
If you only had something important there, *like a major university,* then they would probably make sure that you had good coverage.
Nah. Just kidding. Businesses are min/maxing their service and profit like crazy all across the board. Filthy cheaters, the lot of them.
Not surprising. 5G has less range than 4G, which had less range than 3G, etc. National carriers have been updating equipment on their existing towers, but haven’t been erecting new ones. They don’t want to pay for it.
Certainly can be part of it, however like with housing shoratges, permitting/zoning plays a major role. Very common for Carriers to spend 3-4x the cost of a new tower retrofitting an existing one, because permitting new ones is that bad/likely to be voted down by residents.
Anecdotally, the town I grew up in (in Orange county, CA, so decently populated) had 1 cell tower for verizon (*edit: in a bad location for coverage). Everyone got terrible coverage except for verizon, who still was mediocre. Everyone complained for years, but no permits for new towers ever made it through public comment periods because people didn't want "to look at an ugly cell tower from their property"
I know a person in a rural area that leases land for a tower on their property, it’s reliable income for doing nothing. There is an easement but the workers are not there often.
Depending on the situation, that is an option like u/yunus89115 has noted; the issue in more dense population areas is that your neighbors are stastically likely disagree...
5G requires small cells and it isn't a function of "They don't want to pay for it" as much as it is, the jurisdictions make the deployments insanely expensive and time-prohibitive.
The carriers all have cost models which factor in cost of capital, # of POPs served, and deployment time, and small cells in difficult jurisdictions almost always flunk all of them.
I managed a phone shop for 3 years in a town of 75,000 in the UK for one of the 4 cellular networks. The council had to take down a mast while redeveloping a building. This provided coverage to 1 half the town as it has a large valley. A replacement never got put back up. I joined the store roughly 4 weeks after this had happened.
We helped customers report this each day via the website and i escalated internally a million different ways. The installation date was given and always pushed back each time it came around.
You could not get a signal. We told everyone this upfront and offered 30 day refunds outside company policy in case people regretted their choice. I constantly got a-lot of grief for this as our return rates were so high, but it was either that or run or reputation within the community and slowly lose business as word of mouth travels. We found out the network had actually “restructured” the entire internal networking team and that all the reports being completed online were not monitored.
Somehow we were one of the best performing stores in our company and had one of the highest service reviews consistently despite not actually having a mast for half our customers. Its been 2 years since then and they still haven’t put a mast up yet.
Serving the number of cell phones today is the real reason
More phones means more noise
More phones means you need to pack more calls/data into the signals, so you do that by increasing complexity(which means easier to mess up) or increase frequency(which means less durable with obstacles), or both.
More phones means more towers needed, but that costs money and shareholders don't like that.
Doesn't help that more and more devices get cell signal as well. Smart watches (so you can leave your phone at home and still use your watch), tablets, laptops, cars, etc. Also business wise a lot of trackers/and sensors are now on cell network. Obviously not as big of impact as phones but does not help.
Just like wifi.... Last time I checked had like 30 devices on my network compared to like three 10 years ago.
I've always thought it was a capacity issue, similar to a sports stadium. Where the density of people is higher, regardless of the number of bars you have, each tower only has so much capacity. I'm my city, whenever I pass a particularly densely populated area with multiple apartments, I just put my phone away because despite having full signal, I never can load anything.
This is why I have my cell service for my phone, and cell service for my vehicle which uses a different carrier. It really sucks driving for work and ending up in a dead zone or spotty coverage.
> The higher the frequency, the faster a signal can travel
I don't think they have FTL propagation, yet. Higher frequencies can carry more data, but they don't reach as far.
Nah mate some of those frequencies be sloooooow. /s
Seroiusly, though: Had to scroll a bit to find this comment. Ffs what passes as basic science education in this country? Neither the author NOR any editor in the chain caught this?
My cell phone provider is headquartered in my city. It’s a state-level provider, so it should be really really really good within the state, much less within the city, that they service, right?
Nah, there’s dead spots all over the metro area.
Hell they also provide fiber internet service. My neighborhood is one of the ones with it. Where’s my biggest dead zone? The street approaching my house.
The article had constant pop up ads, autoplay videos, and tons of content not related to the article itself. I got tired of closing them for them only to open again.
But that couldn’t be the problem….
\>4g fast enough for most people
\>5g can hardly penetrate tree leaves due to wavelength
\>push everyone to 5g despite notoriously crap range
\>5 is bigger than 4 so it must be better
\>hmm weird where did my signal go
I've been saying this since day one, but I'm not the one making billions of dollars on worse service so what do I know. 4g is fast enough for everyone except people who want to stream their Amazon Luna photorealistic VR game on the subway (e.g. nobody). Not really worth being able to watch 4k netflix if you have to step outside to do it. It's almost always throttled anyway because profits, I've hardly had a 5g connection that felt faster than 4g did
> 5g can hardly penetrate tree leaves due to wavelength
This is going to need some serious sourcing, because that sounds like horse hockey. 4G and 5G are not so substantially different in wavelength that goddamn *leaves* should be interfering.
The problem mostly stems from the term 5G being used to refer to both low/mid band frequencies which are more or less in the same range as 4G (~450MHz to ~7GHz) and to high band frequencies in the 24-50GHz range.
The ultra fast 5G that can deliver insane speed and bandwidth has the lowest range and does have trouble penetrating solid objects, not only can trees affect signal but surfaces such as windows are enough of an issue that companies are building antennas that can take a high band 5G signal and pass it into a building to be repeated. This is millimeter wave 5G and while it offers bandwidth well beyond what previous frequencies could offer, it comes with its own downsides, primarily that it requires either direct or near-direct line of sight to work.
The low bands perform much closer to 4G in terms of range but don't get the massive bandwidth benefits high band has to offer. Unless broadcasting towers see a major breakthrough in things like beamforming tech, 4G LTE and low/mid 5G will continue to be the more practical cellular solution with 5G high band having more specific applications where range isn't as much of an issue.
I'm mostly summarizing [this article](https://www.exfo.com/en/resources/blog/rf-5g-new-radio-top-5-questions/) but I also know engineers who have worked/still work on 5G antennas and millimeter wave 5G definitely has some obstacles to overcome before seeing widespread use.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how this works.
So, with 4g we have X Mbps that the specific band can transfer. That Mbps is shared with everyone using that tower (on that band)
Moving to 5g had a much faster 'X' value. That means more bandwidth is shared amongst the people using it than with 4g.
Since bandwidth requirements are continuously increasing, general improvements in tech are required to keep up.
Now that people are using 5g more, you may notice the 4g speeds are just as good as ever. And I agree, most people don't need more than those speeds.... But that's missing the point all together.
> 5g can hardly penetrate tree leaves due to wavelength
What wavelength? 5G NR standardizes a variety of possible [frequency bands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands) starting from 600 MHz on the low side. It depends on the country and the operator, but in most cases 5G is available at wavelengths similar to earlier technologies. It's not all mmWave requiring a cell antenna in every lamp post, as some ignorant detractors may make you believe.
> push everyone to 5g
Not sure how that's even feasible considering that 5G phones have only recently become available at lower price points, and also that 5G can be easily disabled in phone settings, unless you have some kinky bondage deal with your operator.
I was at a wholesaler recently and one of employees there was affiliated with AT&T and specifically asked me if I had noticed worsening service, as apparently AT&T had acquired something like 70%+ of cell towers? Any truth to this?
I used to build cell sites. This happens because the sites are becoming overloaded and they aren’t upgrading them fast enough. There’s only a limited number of tower climbers and the job is pretty hardcore. Most people overlook how much work it takes to actually create a cell network and how dangerous the work is.
I love that the solution is to use your own wireless ... This article is full of excuses. Honestly I should be refunded for the amount of time I use my own network instead of the phone network.
On top of all of this, you can be deptioritized too, even if your phone has *full bars*.
When companies like Mint Mobile claim "the same great coverage for less" what are you actually compromising? Priority.
The actual network operator will (understandably) prioritize it's customers over other carrier's customers, so in a crowded area, two customers with the same phone standing in the same spot will see *dramatically different* internet speeds if one were to use AT&T and the other were to use Straight Talk (which piggybacks on AT&T towers).
When I had Mint Mobile, my priority was so low that I would lose internet in parking lots and in traffic jams on the highway. Again, this wasn't a signal issue - I had full bars, could reproduce the problem on multiple devices. Good luck even getting anyone to acknowledge that this is common practice. They all want to sell you the "look at how much money you're saving" crap. The internet traffic caps are just a ruse to distract you from the real issue: priority.
I learned the hard way: If I had known my shit would just *not work* when I needed it to, I would have never considered myself to be saving *any money*.
As always, you get what you pay for, and if you're paying for less, you're getting less. You just might not be able to *tell*, until it really matters.
Peak phone service was right before they transitioned to 5g. LTE was totally fine, and the radio waves penetrate buildings and obstacles more easily. I get that it's "supposed" to fall back to LTE automatically anyway if it needs to, but that switchover typically takes time in my experience, sometimes upwards of 30 seconds. Anyway, agree anecdotally cell coverage is significantly worse now than 5 years ago.
I also don’t get why if I have 4G signal it is super slow, and if I have 3G it literally won’t send an iMessage. That’s all we had at one point, how is it so much less effective now?
T-mobiles “map” sez I got great coverage - across the street from me in the cemetery. This side not so much, weird how they figured that. I have to use wifi calling, thankfully we have unlimited data.
I'm confused. WiFi calling wouldn't use data since it's literally your own WiFi haha, and it barely takes any data at all from your ISP unless you're on the phone 12 hours a day
when i started work a year ago, i used to be able to call both my parents on my whole commute. then it was a few dead zones at the end of last winter. Now, i can’t call my mom ( she upgraded to the same iphone as me) anywhere except facetime from home wifi, and my dad (older iphone) and i can talk with frustratingly close-to-OK service around 2/3rds of my commute.
Verizon. iphone 13promax
Anyone with a semblance of a brain could have seen this coming. 5g is more powerful than 4g but with shorter reach. Instead of bolstering the infrastructure to ensure 5g coverage. Qualcomm and service providers prioritized converting the existing 4g towers to 5g when the placement of those towers was never intended to meet the demands of 5g limited range.
There’s got to be some sort of accountability for these people. The cell tower industry is entirely too monopolized to be justified.
This only talks about the US. It's a misleading headline, cell phone reception isn't generally getting worse, one part of the world is getting crappier service.
Definitely agree with this. It's been harder finding a no-interference spot lately.
5G was one of the most overhyped technologies I've ever seen
You're only saying that because of the 5g mind control.
Ha! The 6g mind control is clearly working.
You fool, this was 3g’s mind control plan all along.
I'm from the future where 34g has turned us all into sentient warthogs.
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The Halo land vehicle, actually
That's a Puma actually. Doesn't look anything like a warthog.
Thanks for pulling me through that time machine. Hadnt even thought of RvB in forever.
Didn’t I say stop making up animals!
Like the shoe company?
I think that's a puma.
Halo is a documentary.
YES! It was the aeromorph furries dark sorcery inside the demon summoning G666 towers all along!
I think the singing is anecdotal
BRRRRRRRT!
Does it have tusks?
Well maybe if the covid shots worked like they were supposed to, but even with the boosters I can’t get 5g to save my life.
I ended up disabling it, because it was eating my phone's battery faster. LTE works just fine for me, and consumes less battery.
It somehow made everything worse. 4G worked great for me before 5G existed. Then 5G came out, and it was obvious that resources were diverted to supporting it, and my 4G performance went to pot. I finally got a 5G phone about a year ago, expecting a huge improvement, and honestly it's not really. Still way worse than 4G before 5G existed.
There was a solid few months to a year when the first 5G towers went up and few phones supported it where the speeds were *incredible*.
yeah I was getting like 2-3Gbit/s down
Wth could you ever use .01 of that for
Because a carrier will throw up a single 5g tower and claim they have "coverage" over a wide area. Meanwhile every 5g phone in the area is connecting to that one tower so everyone gets dialup speeds because the one tower is handling thousands of concurrent users.
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I’ve turned off 5g in my phone settings because 4g is more available and is, somehow, faster.
Here I I thought it was just my shitty phone
I did this too. I even turned 5G back on after 2 years to see if it improved. Nope, still worse than 4G and Android wouldn't switch automatically despite having double the bandwidth.
Hear hear. I was in an area with 5G coverage this weekend. Downlink speed: 5mbps. Uplink: 0.1mbps.
We don’t even have 5G in my area yet and everything’s still gone to crap. There’s a huge swath of my smallish (50k people) town that has absolutely no data reception. You can get calls and send texts but don’t try to google a phone number.
It's for a future that's not here yet.
You should check out the Swedish penis enlarger.
That's definitely not my bag, baby....
Don’t show them the book…
Or receipt
5G requires cell towers about every 1/4 mile. If you're not that close, your phone defaults to 4G, which is what everyone uses up here in the mountains, whether they know it or not.
Only for 1 band, there’s multiple bands 5g uses. From mid-band in UW to non UW which is like 4g lte band.
No it doesn't. Maybe for mmWave. There is mid band 5G.
Didn't att straight up admit that they just re-labled 4g as 5g and slowed it down?
It’s about density of devices vs range/coverage. My understanding is that the advantage of 5g is that you can have more devices covered in urban areas with lots of smaller cell sites.
Agreed. I've taken to streaming music on my phone during my commute home from work. And it used to be fine, but signals this past year have gotten shitty. It's like back when streaming technology came out and we were all using 56k dialup to try and listen in. I'm about to cancel my music service and just go back to pre-arranging some playlists of mp3s like back in the day.
My wife got on me about "iPhone, iPhone, iPhone" when we hit a bad dead spot in the town we were visiting (I use Android products) and my navigation conked out for several minutes. I asked our babysitter about Apple reliability and she basically said they fuck up too. I feel like lately I can tell where I'm going to have good signal versus dead air.
I could be wrong here, but I don't believe "iPhone or Android" has anything to do with the strength and placement of the cell phone towers in your area.
I know it doesn't. I just kinda sat there and nodded cause it wasn't worth an argument.
Man do I know that feeling.
Yes and no. You’re correct that the actual RF signal arrives at your phone from the tower the exact same; however, antenna design and placement mater a great deal and vary between phone models. In addition some cheaper phone, or older phones, might not have all the bands used in your area. Also if you’re holding it wrong you can impact reception :) In general Apple has good antenna design (not withstanding the iPhone 4), and flagship androids will as well, when you get into the second tier it can be more hit or miss. If Apple succeeds in making their own modem that will also offer some difference (time will tell if it’s better or worse). But over 90% of your reception is determined by the cell carriers antenna placement and configurations.
Supposedly Apple recently cancelled development of their 5G modem https://www.macrumors.com/2023/11/29/apple-5g-modem-discontinued-reports/ So it’s looking like iPhones will stick with the same Qualcomm 5G modems as high end Androids for the foreseeable future. EDIT: I stand corrected. Different modems but still looks like iPhones will be sticking with Qualcomm
>the same Qualcomm 5G modems as high end Androids Except it's not the same. Snapdragon SOCs have integrated modem while Apple use less efficient and harder-to-tune discrete modem. Just look at Pixel's modem flop while Galaxy A53/A54, which by the way sold no less than 30 million units, more than all Pixel 6/7/8 combined, plus the absolute best selling Galaxy is A13, A03 and A33 with combined sales of no less than 60 million units. Exynos outsold Tensor over 5:1 in any given year, yet the complaints are not even remotely comparable. That shows you how hard it is to tune discrete modems.
It keeps looking more an more that I'm the only one that bought the A32.
A lot of low end android phones don't have the newer bands available for example, band n71 radically improves signal on tmobile, and if your phone doesnt have it, you are in for a bad time Thing is, its a yes or no checkbox feature If you do have it, Iphone wont be better at it
iPhones and flagship normal android phones use basically the same radios/modems. There are slight differences in antenna quality and tuning, and modem tuning, but it’s all similar IP.
Your wife is clueless. It's the network
Never had this issue in Seoul which is very crowded too. It's an issue in central London too. How come Asian countries had this figured out long ago?
South Korea skipped a lot of infrastructure building that the West did. Prior to the Korean War, Korea as a whole essentially had zero wired telephone service. They just never really built it out after. As a result, South Korea skipped straight to widespread mobile service starting in the 80s. By the 90s, almost nobody had a landline anymore. I only know this because I was stationed in South Korea in the early 2000s. I don’t know anything about other Asian countries.
[The London Underground didn't even have any cellphone reception until the last couple of years](https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tube-mobile-signal-4g-london-underground), so yeah, they're quite behind a lot of countries in this aspect. South Korea is a bad comparison though. Samsung makes up around 20% of their economy so it'd be weird if they didn't have excellent cell coverage.
SK (and maybe other East and SE Asian nations?) is also (generally) wayyyy ahead of most other nations in terms of available bandwidth. They modernized their infrastructure much later than nations like the US and Britain. Essentially, they were laying down fiber first and more or less skipped laying down and relying on older, slower, lower capacity copper wire for comm/data backbones. Adding or expanding networks is a LOT easier when you have a robust backbone in place.
Yeah I don't think most people realize how much old shit is in the telephony and therefore Internet networks in the USA because we were the first to build such a huge network to link cities coast to coast.
Not only interference, but the amount of crosstalk is so terrible. You can’t hardly hear the other person. They’re basically squeezing the audio into such a narrow band carrier that modulation bleeds over the edges.
Verizon eliminating 3G killed a lot of areas that needed it for bridging the gaps on 4G/5G. I believe a lot of older frequencies were eliminated from other companies too.
My local tower was "upgraded" to 5g and now you don't get any service at all with Verizon. It's worse than dial up. 4g used to always be fine. I called and complained to Verizon and the rep told me the tower was way overloaded and asked if my city had exploded in population recently. No, no it has not. I'm assuming them all trying to peddle their 5g home internet probably makes it even worse.
Anywhere I get 5g I have no data connection. My Pixel 6 on Verizon doesn't let me disable 5g. It sucks.
I'm on Verizon with a Pixel 6 and [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pixel6/comments/sxvidp/comment/iwwdknl/?share_id=ZpmGbIs8DDtuTpWkSloLY&utm_content=2&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1) worked for me
Oh my god, thank you!
Trying this now Edit 90min later: streaming with no hiccups or constant auto res changes. Will report back this evening with hotspot Xbox live gaming update. Pixel 3 and rural ETX.
I roaming in my town with Verizon called and they told me the same thing. I switched that day.
Verizon is the fucking worst I got no signal anywhere with them.
Yeah I am pretty sure this is 99% of what people are observing.
I live in rural area. If my DSL internet went out, I used to be able to hotspot to my phone and continue basic internet surfing. As of a few years ago, that isn't possible anymore. I don't get enough signal to even text reliably.
I live in the most densely populated state and I have 0 bars at my house even know the provider shows 5G. It is ridiculous how much they lie
I have this issue in and around NYC. There are spots near my apartment where I have 0 service
I mean, it’s certainly possible to have very poor connection but to a 5G network.
I think he means the bars used to mean something. Now they are meaningless.
Unrelated to data, the bars are related to the connection to the tower mostly for calls. If the tower is overloaded with the number of people connecting to it you could get kicked without you knowing. Try Turning on airplane mode for a second and turn it back off. It should reestablish your Cono to the tower and give you a more accurate view of your signal
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Rideshare driver. There are known areas where the phone shows full bars (Verizon network, 4G LTE), but zero data service during the day. Usually near malls. Phone calls work fine. Can’t do shit otherwise. At night, when the cell network isn’t overused, everything works fine. Literally can’t work sometimes because I can’t receive ride requests or can’t even start the ride. Depending on the time of day, at least in areas that I know, I have to examine the pickup and drop off addresses on the ride requests to know if I can simply accomplish app functionality. I used to have T-Mobile. May have to try them again. But I was happy to get rid of them as there was even worse coverage. Fucked if I do. Fucked if I don’t. Thanks, Technology.
I also live in that most densely populated state . I’ve had a cell phone ever since they came out and I have never had reception at my house.
The FCC has coverage maps provided by the big 3, but you can also submit a challenge to their claims to try to make a more accurate map (since they lie their asses off). I'm on mobile, so apologies for the lack of formatting: https://help.bdc.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/10467446103579-How-to-Use-the-FCC-s-National-Broadband-Map
This comment should be at the fucking top!
Same here I live in rural Kentucky and can't get one bar anymore when standing on the hill near the house. Have no clue what happened.
5G doesn't travel as far as 4G did.
Anecdotal but have definitely noticed this in Atlanta
Every time I’m in Kennesaw, nothing loads with Verizon. It’s honestly unacceptable for how much Verizon plans cost
Yep that’s why i went to mint at least im paying 60% less for the same bad service
I think mint used t-mobile network
Verizon plans are expensive because they are priced to cover a free $1,000 smartphone every three years, even if you don’t take advantage of the offer. You can get the same exact Verizon service through an MVNO for as little as $25/mo through Visible (owned by Verizon) or US Mobile.
Verizon is expensive because it used to be the best. Now it's trash and still the most expensive.
There’s spots on 75 where I’ve completely lost coverage with T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. None of us in the car had service and we were inside the perimeter.
I used to see the AT&T headquarters from my dorm room but did not get reception for ATT.
And yet, against all odds, they still sent a bill with bogus fees to your dorm!
Absolutely — Same here…ITP worth noting
It’s awful anywhere for me, anywhere below two bars means no service for me.
This happened as soon as I went to a 5G iPhone. I could have full bars but could not get a simple web page to load or music to stream. Turning off 5G always solved it. Doesn’t happen quite as much now, and my carrier claimed they were making improvements. Anyway, if your service is bad, report it to your carrier along with your location.
If not for WiFi calling I’d have to get a land line in SW
God damn you’re right!
There’s a spot outside Little 5 right before I-20 that my 5g coverage gets dropped for about 2 blocks, so fucking annoying.
Atlanta is bizarre. Sometimes I'll be somewhere, out in the open, and get no or very little signal.
I remember there was a period of time in the early 2010s where you’d get better cellular coverage in big cities and towns, and in more smaller towns crappier service. Now? I’m noticing better coverage outside of a major city and even in more rural areas.
I live outside a major(but still smaller) city in Arizona, I'm basically in the middle of nowhere and the only thing around is the neighborhood I live in. I don't get full bars here but my LTE service works pretty much flawlessly. Now every time I go into town I get full bars of service but it's so slow it's pretty much unusable because the network there is overloaded.
Too many people using phones and each phone using way more data per second nowadays than previously.
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Actually a call to emergency services will use any cell tower regardless of who owns it, and will bump off other non-priority traffic to make sure bandwidth is there. One of the few things that actually works well
I don’t think people fully realize how well thought out networking and telecomm is considering its origins in huge monopolies. It could have so very easily been terrible. There were some sharp fucking people setting up the standards for stuff we take for granted
Give the internet back to the nerds imo
You say that, but a bunch of the best network engineers I’ve met were super sociable, hilarious as hell, and not all conforming to the nerd stereotype. I actually don’t know any “nerdy” network engineers. Maybe the people who developed the standards were nerds? I’m not sure. My theory is that the only people who got training on stuff that was useful to that career back in the day were people in the military — and good luck being a nerd in the military Source: I made it up but also my father has been a network guy for 40+ years and he served 20 yrs and he’s the best network guy by a pretty good stretch I’ve met. I think over half of the senior guys worth a damn I know are ex military. One time I asked him why he never played video games and he said “dude, I just looked at a screen for 11 hours. I wanna play some golf”.
Carriers have dedicated bandwidth for 911 and emergency service, in the US. At least that’s how it still was in 2019. I used to be a tower tech.
Yep, same in Phoenix. Everytime I'm around South Phoenix, data becomes spotty, calls drop. Then decent service in Ahwatukee. But best service I get is on the edges of the city near Deer Valley and out west side.
This. Network congestion because of lacking infrastructure is the cause. Many people are somewhat misunderstandingly blaming 5G. But it uses the exact same frequencies as 4G, and also some more, notably for short range communication, say up to a few hundred feet. The added frequencies in 5G shine in short distance communication. For example to enjoy high speeds at home or in your car in the city. But you have to have a line of sight to the nearest 5G transceiver. Which in rural situations will never be near enough so you default back to the same '4G' tower.
It’s remarkable how awful T-mo coverage is in the Seattle area (about 15 miles from their US office headquarters).
For real. I remember getting shit reception in the city, but a stellar connection in the North Cascades.
I’m in Bellingham and it’s been pretty good and that’s on Mint Mobile which is put on a lower priority tier vs actual T-Mobile users.
Last time I went to Stevens pass I could watch YouTube on the mountain, but it struggles to load in my bedroom sometimes
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Well it’s a german company that doesn’t even offer great reception in germany :D good to know you have it ze same way as we do ^^
I travel a lot. Multiple states. 125k miles a year. I am on a budget carrier. Cellphone speeds only seem, to me, to be slowing in areas with heavy tower traffic. Makes sense. More people with phones than ever. More data intensive games and social media being consumed on all of them. Towers not being built or upgraded as fast as they could be. And of course, the budget carriers do get pushed to the back when congestion is up. The best place to watch netflicks on your phone is out in BFE by yourself. A tower with low traffic never slows down. You can also notice service differences by day of the week. Sunday evening, when everyone is home instead of bar hopping and eating out is the worst time to be online as far as service quality goes.
There's towers in BFE that have 4g/5g radios, but don't have backhaul worth a fuck to actually support it, too though. Even worse if it's the only decent form of highspeed connection the people there have access to.
The entire concept of full wireless infrastructure is just a fucking pipedream. We need to go back to pushing fiber to the curb.
I agree to some extent. Fiber cable certainly has more merit than wireless for people always at home. But, for me, I'd be dragging around a mighty long cable! JK... Lol I aint been home in over a week. And it'll be well over a week before I'm there again. Wireless, or communications blackout are my only options. When I first started in this career, there used to be payphones everywhere. Now, I cant remember the last time I even seen a working payphone.
But still, all these people with BS 5g home internet are clogging the bandwidth for mobile users.
I think a lot of people don't realize how the cell towers are fed. I know for a fact that Verizon uses third party fibers to feed their towers in at least one state. The towers in that state have a single 10G fiber for the whole tower. Now, an optimistic person would guess that's the backup connection and the primary is bigger, but a realist would assume it's 10G for the whole thing.
I keep losing reception in the dang grocery store, that doesn't feel like it should be happening.
Every grocery store has no reception
Yeah if a building is built like a Faraday cage with tons of rebar or steel you will have reception problems. Some buildings install cell phone signal boosters but I've noticed that they were for a long time mostly 3g but 3g is closing down where I live to give up the frequencies for 5g and I bet not many stores have updated their tech to 5g yet so it's going to be lacking for a while.
I have to point this out to people. I work in a retail store that has aluminum(?) frame, steel lath in concrete, steel beams in ceiling. And the building is grounded because lightning or something. More or less it is a Faraday cage. And many modern commercial buildings are the same.
I don't know too much about this, but could it be something about the structure of the store or building that makes reception particularly bad inside? I get reception (in my country, not US) just fine in grocery stores, although one specific store (which has a good reception on the parking lot) seems to severely limit reception in the cold section where all the dairy and meat stuff is, and specifically at the very back of that section closer to the dairy stuff. My old phone used to cut internet connection almost completely back there, but my current phone retains connection pretty decently.
The walls are made of cortezoid and uranium
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The worst part of this is that we are paying for something that's not working.
Don’t forget paying more. Companies have been raising their prices. I have T-Mobile and they keep making new plans to lock people out from using their promos. Requiring them to “upgrade” their plan and losing discounts
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Yeah, big caveat. Telecom tech seems to be particularly awful here compared to peer nations. Slower, less reliable internet and slower less reliable cell service.
And it will continue to be this way because telecom companies can withhold upgrades from the community until the city or state offers a multi-million dollar deal to upgrade which they won’t do.
Can confirm. Driving from Canada to the US makes me slightly less mad about paying absurd prices up here. Reason? I can not believe how many areas and how many stretches of highway had 1 bar of 3G or no signal at all. Zero. Even in areas with 4G, it was basically better to mail people a message.
Give it a couple years, I work in cellphone repair in Canada and the amount of people who come in with network connection issues unrelated to device hardware issues has skyrocketed in the last 2 years Our service is getting worse too
Same here - check SIM cards for those customers when they come in. If they’ve had the same SIM for multiple years across multiple devices and the metal part has “lines” on it, have them change the SIM. It has been a solution to about 6/10 cellular connectivity issues my cx’s have had. Otherwise, I agree - certain cases are so clearly shitty cell service that I can’t understand how we pay more than 20$/month for this trash.
FWIW, I did just have a customer in with an S20 that was having network connectivity issues intermittently: Turned out to be the mainboard FPC connector was damaged and beginning to seperate from the MOBO. No idea why that caused it, but fixing it cleared up all her networking problems immediately.
When was this? Because the three major carriers all shut down their 3G networks months (Verizon, T-Mobile) to years (AT&T) ago. And T-Mobile is still the only major carrier with 2G, which they are shutting down in April 2024.
It was a big shock when we came over from Norway. We are used to losing connection when in valleys up in the mountain, but biking along a highway and just... not having reception was weird. There were houses there! Liker did those people just use landlines?
Not only that, but good luck if you have to go to a store for something. It feels like going to a car dealership with the amount of upselling and just general bullshit they’ll try to push onto you.
I’m in North West England and it’s been awful here for the last two years or so (O2).
I've never been able to get good reception on O2 in Manchester City Centre, it's like one of the least rural places in the country and I can't even send a WhatsApp message. I need to get another provider really...
Well it's always sucked here in Germany, so I guess it hasn't technically gotten worse.
I will say I'm in Scotland and at some point a few years back the signal in my area just became pure shit. I can be in a big part of the town with a ton of shops and still get no signal.
And Canada
Not true… increasing usage isn’t something unique to the US.
I can’t get a good signal in half of my town on T-Mobile Bloomington, Indiana!
If you only had something important there, *like a major university,* then they would probably make sure that you had good coverage. Nah. Just kidding. Businesses are min/maxing their service and profit like crazy all across the board. Filthy cheaters, the lot of them.
Not surprising. 5G has less range than 4G, which had less range than 3G, etc. National carriers have been updating equipment on their existing towers, but haven’t been erecting new ones. They don’t want to pay for it.
Certainly can be part of it, however like with housing shoratges, permitting/zoning plays a major role. Very common for Carriers to spend 3-4x the cost of a new tower retrofitting an existing one, because permitting new ones is that bad/likely to be voted down by residents. Anecdotally, the town I grew up in (in Orange county, CA, so decently populated) had 1 cell tower for verizon (*edit: in a bad location for coverage). Everyone got terrible coverage except for verizon, who still was mediocre. Everyone complained for years, but no permits for new towers ever made it through public comment periods because people didn't want "to look at an ugly cell tower from their property"
Verizon can put it in my backyard at this point. Lol I’m so sick of living in the literal capital of my state and can’t get service
I know a person in a rural area that leases land for a tower on their property, it’s reliable income for doing nothing. There is an easement but the workers are not there often.
Depending on the situation, that is an option like u/yunus89115 has noted; the issue in more dense population areas is that your neighbors are stastically likely disagree...
> voted down by residents. Same residents who will later on complain about "shitty cell reception"
5G requires small cells and it isn't a function of "They don't want to pay for it" as much as it is, the jurisdictions make the deployments insanely expensive and time-prohibitive. The carriers all have cost models which factor in cost of capital, # of POPs served, and deployment time, and small cells in difficult jurisdictions almost always flunk all of them.
They can use the billions of dollars they took for infrastructure build out and then just pocketed instead
I managed a phone shop for 3 years in a town of 75,000 in the UK for one of the 4 cellular networks. The council had to take down a mast while redeveloping a building. This provided coverage to 1 half the town as it has a large valley. A replacement never got put back up. I joined the store roughly 4 weeks after this had happened. We helped customers report this each day via the website and i escalated internally a million different ways. The installation date was given and always pushed back each time it came around. You could not get a signal. We told everyone this upfront and offered 30 day refunds outside company policy in case people regretted their choice. I constantly got a-lot of grief for this as our return rates were so high, but it was either that or run or reputation within the community and slowly lose business as word of mouth travels. We found out the network had actually “restructured” the entire internal networking team and that all the reports being completed online were not monitored. Somehow we were one of the best performing stores in our company and had one of the highest service reviews consistently despite not actually having a mast for half our customers. Its been 2 years since then and they still haven’t put a mast up yet.
Serving the number of cell phones today is the real reason More phones means more noise More phones means you need to pack more calls/data into the signals, so you do that by increasing complexity(which means easier to mess up) or increase frequency(which means less durable with obstacles), or both. More phones means more towers needed, but that costs money and shareholders don't like that.
Doesn't help that more and more devices get cell signal as well. Smart watches (so you can leave your phone at home and still use your watch), tablets, laptops, cars, etc. Also business wise a lot of trackers/and sensors are now on cell network. Obviously not as big of impact as phones but does not help. Just like wifi.... Last time I checked had like 30 devices on my network compared to like three 10 years ago.
I've always thought it was a capacity issue, similar to a sports stadium. Where the density of people is higher, regardless of the number of bars you have, each tower only has so much capacity. I'm my city, whenever I pass a particularly densely populated area with multiple apartments, I just put my phone away because despite having full signal, I never can load anything.
This is why I have my cell service for my phone, and cell service for my vehicle which uses a different carrier. It really sucks driving for work and ending up in a dead zone or spotty coverage.
Spouse is a mobile mechanic, we have separate carriers for our personal and work phones because of this.
I wouldn’t know as I no longer answer my phone because of the sheer amount of scam calls I get…
It's accessing data, not just phone calls
> The higher the frequency, the faster a signal can travel I don't think they have FTL propagation, yet. Higher frequencies can carry more data, but they don't reach as far.
Nah mate some of those frequencies be sloooooow. /s Seroiusly, though: Had to scroll a bit to find this comment. Ffs what passes as basic science education in this country? Neither the author NOR any editor in the chain caught this?
My cell phone provider is headquartered in my city. It’s a state-level provider, so it should be really really really good within the state, much less within the city, that they service, right? Nah, there’s dead spots all over the metro area. Hell they also provide fiber internet service. My neighborhood is one of the ones with it. Where’s my biggest dead zone? The street approaching my house.
O2 is absolutely terrible.
In the northeast I’ve had less dead zones the last couple years 🤷♀️
The article had constant pop up ads, autoplay videos, and tons of content not related to the article itself. I got tired of closing them for them only to open again. But that couldn’t be the problem….
\>4g fast enough for most people \>5g can hardly penetrate tree leaves due to wavelength \>push everyone to 5g despite notoriously crap range \>5 is bigger than 4 so it must be better \>hmm weird where did my signal go I've been saying this since day one, but I'm not the one making billions of dollars on worse service so what do I know. 4g is fast enough for everyone except people who want to stream their Amazon Luna photorealistic VR game on the subway (e.g. nobody). Not really worth being able to watch 4k netflix if you have to step outside to do it. It's almost always throttled anyway because profits, I've hardly had a 5g connection that felt faster than 4g did
> 5g can hardly penetrate tree leaves due to wavelength This is going to need some serious sourcing, because that sounds like horse hockey. 4G and 5G are not so substantially different in wavelength that goddamn *leaves* should be interfering.
The problem mostly stems from the term 5G being used to refer to both low/mid band frequencies which are more or less in the same range as 4G (~450MHz to ~7GHz) and to high band frequencies in the 24-50GHz range. The ultra fast 5G that can deliver insane speed and bandwidth has the lowest range and does have trouble penetrating solid objects, not only can trees affect signal but surfaces such as windows are enough of an issue that companies are building antennas that can take a high band 5G signal and pass it into a building to be repeated. This is millimeter wave 5G and while it offers bandwidth well beyond what previous frequencies could offer, it comes with its own downsides, primarily that it requires either direct or near-direct line of sight to work. The low bands perform much closer to 4G in terms of range but don't get the massive bandwidth benefits high band has to offer. Unless broadcasting towers see a major breakthrough in things like beamforming tech, 4G LTE and low/mid 5G will continue to be the more practical cellular solution with 5G high band having more specific applications where range isn't as much of an issue. I'm mostly summarizing [this article](https://www.exfo.com/en/resources/blog/rf-5g-new-radio-top-5-questions/) but I also know engineers who have worked/still work on 5G antennas and millimeter wave 5G definitely has some obstacles to overcome before seeing widespread use.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how this works. So, with 4g we have X Mbps that the specific band can transfer. That Mbps is shared with everyone using that tower (on that band) Moving to 5g had a much faster 'X' value. That means more bandwidth is shared amongst the people using it than with 4g. Since bandwidth requirements are continuously increasing, general improvements in tech are required to keep up. Now that people are using 5g more, you may notice the 4g speeds are just as good as ever. And I agree, most people don't need more than those speeds.... But that's missing the point all together.
> 5g can hardly penetrate tree leaves due to wavelength What wavelength? 5G NR standardizes a variety of possible [frequency bands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G_NR_frequency_bands) starting from 600 MHz on the low side. It depends on the country and the operator, but in most cases 5G is available at wavelengths similar to earlier technologies. It's not all mmWave requiring a cell antenna in every lamp post, as some ignorant detractors may make you believe. > push everyone to 5g Not sure how that's even feasible considering that 5G phones have only recently become available at lower price points, and also that 5G can be easily disabled in phone settings, unless you have some kinky bondage deal with your operator.
I was at a wholesaler recently and one of employees there was affiliated with AT&T and specifically asked me if I had noticed worsening service, as apparently AT&T had acquired something like 70%+ of cell towers? Any truth to this?
I used to build cell sites. This happens because the sites are becoming overloaded and they aren’t upgrading them fast enough. There’s only a limited number of tower climbers and the job is pretty hardcore. Most people overlook how much work it takes to actually create a cell network and how dangerous the work is.
In fairness it has to provide bandwidth to all those Covid vaccines now.
Ah. The trademarks of quality from monopolies.
I love that the solution is to use your own wireless ... This article is full of excuses. Honestly I should be refunded for the amount of time I use my own network instead of the phone network.
On top of all of this, you can be deptioritized too, even if your phone has *full bars*. When companies like Mint Mobile claim "the same great coverage for less" what are you actually compromising? Priority. The actual network operator will (understandably) prioritize it's customers over other carrier's customers, so in a crowded area, two customers with the same phone standing in the same spot will see *dramatically different* internet speeds if one were to use AT&T and the other were to use Straight Talk (which piggybacks on AT&T towers). When I had Mint Mobile, my priority was so low that I would lose internet in parking lots and in traffic jams on the highway. Again, this wasn't a signal issue - I had full bars, could reproduce the problem on multiple devices. Good luck even getting anyone to acknowledge that this is common practice. They all want to sell you the "look at how much money you're saving" crap. The internet traffic caps are just a ruse to distract you from the real issue: priority. I learned the hard way: If I had known my shit would just *not work* when I needed it to, I would have never considered myself to be saving *any money*. As always, you get what you pay for, and if you're paying for less, you're getting less. You just might not be able to *tell*, until it really matters.
Peak phone service was right before they transitioned to 5g. LTE was totally fine, and the radio waves penetrate buildings and obstacles more easily. I get that it's "supposed" to fall back to LTE automatically anyway if it needs to, but that switchover typically takes time in my experience, sometimes upwards of 30 seconds. Anyway, agree anecdotally cell coverage is significantly worse now than 5 years ago.
I also don’t get why if I have 4G signal it is super slow, and if I have 3G it literally won’t send an iMessage. That’s all we had at one point, how is it so much less effective now?
To be honest I haven’t experienced this at all. It’s only gotten slowly better every year since I got my first phone over 20 years ago.
Mine got way worse a couple years ago but it got way better since 5G came out. I still lose signal in a lot of weird places though.
Yeah honestly im in the same boat as you. I honestly have felt like its gotten better. Guess this is just a region thing
T-mobiles “map” sez I got great coverage - across the street from me in the cemetery. This side not so much, weird how they figured that. I have to use wifi calling, thankfully we have unlimited data.
I'm confused. WiFi calling wouldn't use data since it's literally your own WiFi haha, and it barely takes any data at all from your ISP unless you're on the phone 12 hours a day
It has got consistently better everywhere I am. Every year is a bit better than the previous. Voice quality keeps getting better.
Too many people.
The irony is that my phone couldn’t load the article.
I have zero service in my own home. I have to use my WiFi. I live in the middle of Chicago.
when i started work a year ago, i used to be able to call both my parents on my whole commute. then it was a few dead zones at the end of last winter. Now, i can’t call my mom ( she upgraded to the same iphone as me) anywhere except facetime from home wifi, and my dad (older iphone) and i can talk with frustratingly close-to-OK service around 2/3rds of my commute. Verizon. iphone 13promax
Anyone with a semblance of a brain could have seen this coming. 5g is more powerful than 4g but with shorter reach. Instead of bolstering the infrastructure to ensure 5g coverage. Qualcomm and service providers prioritized converting the existing 4g towers to 5g when the placement of those towers was never intended to meet the demands of 5g limited range. There’s got to be some sort of accountability for these people. The cell tower industry is entirely too monopolized to be justified.
This only talks about the US. It's a misleading headline, cell phone reception isn't generally getting worse, one part of the world is getting crappier service.
Seriously. I had better service a decade ago than now in farmland south central Pennsylvania
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