The Current State of 5G in the UK... By TechFlow

Hello and welcome it's Alex here for tech flow and let's kick off 2021 by talking about the next generation of wireless technology. In other words, how fast is 5g now for those of you that have been following me for a while or for those of you that know me, you will know that I own my own wisp, which stands for wireless internet service provision. Basically, I sell broadband to people wirelessly, so this next generation, this 5g stuff, really interests me, and this is going to be an exciting video to go out and test it. I actually was planning on releasing this video before Christmas last year, because I went to London to try and test 5g. I was in 5g areas, but unfortunately, for some reason I only ever managed to receive 4g plus really, really annoying, so we're going to go out today and hopefully do a little more testing with a bit more success than we had in 2020, and I'm working with Qualcomm uh on this video on team android Qualcomm are the guys that are making this whole uh 5g thing possible. They've sent me out this Motorola, which has a Qualcomm chip in it, but before we talk about that phone and go out and do some testing, I do just want to touch a little on what 5g actually is and the different variants of it.

And no it's not like the 5g. You can find on your home router, which actually runs at five gigahertz and is called 5g. This is called 5g, but all it means is its the fifth generation of the mobile data technology. If you would like to know here in the UK, all of our network providers, so that's 3, EE, o2 and Vodafone all operate their new 5g, their new 5g networks about three and a half gigahertz. One of the main things and we'll touch on this.

A little later is capacity. Having higher speeds doesn't necessarily mean one. Individual person is going to get higher speeds. It means everybody on the network gets a chunk of a much higher speed, so everybody's speeds are theoretically higher. That's the whole point, so I got into the car and I drove to my closest 5g enabled city which is actually on the EE network.

To my surprise, as soon as I got there, I took the Moto G out of my pocket and ah sick. Okay, it's got it. I don't know if you guys can see on here. However, this phone has 5g. This marks the first ever time I have had 5g on a phone- yes quite impressive, but not head.

Turning and I was after head turning 180 megs, yes very impressive, but I'm not impressed enough. I don't think my signal here is very, very strong. What I'm going to do is drive around town, see if I can get some stronger signal and hopefully get some better speeds. So next I drove around Lincoln with a signal meter out on my phone until I had a really, really strong signal to the 5g network or to a 5g antenna. I got this really, really strong signal pulled over and realized that the antenna was right in front of me.

So there's quite a lot going on up on top of this building. I think the antennas that we are connected to are these. I didn't run any tests here, because I came to the conclusion that it would be a little unfair doing the test right near the antenna. So I drove about 200 meters down the block where I still had complete line of sight to the antenna, and I started my tests 400 on the download there that clocked at that is absolutely insane and faster than 99 of most people's home broadband speeds. Here in the UK now there's been reports of other people going out and testing 5g, mainly in America, and the reports have been negative on the fact that the signal has been awful, meaning that one minute you've got 5g, and then you turn the corner and the next minute.

You don't, and that's not the case here in the UK, because all of our carriers here use what's called mid-band 5g now, there are three bands low mid and high band and basically the low band means the speeds aren't going to be as good, but you're going to be able to go further from the antenna and the high band basically means that you've got to be really close to the antenna. But the speeds are really, really good, whereas the mid-band kind of just lies in the middle of that and that's what we're dealing with here in the UK. So to test this theory, I drove another corner around the block and then made sure there was a building blocking the complete line of sight that I had before from me and the antenna. I still had the 5g signal and, as you can see on my signal meter, I was about minus 100 dBm, which, if you know anything about signal that is on the worse end of the spectrum. To my surprise, I was still able to pick up a really, really respectable 180 on the download, which is really, really fascinating, and it was at this point that all of this 5g stuff, especially in the mid-band, started to make sense to me with all of this extra capacity and this pretty decent 5g range.

It means that all of our devices in the next 5 to 10 years, like our cars and wristwatches, never to mention our phones and computers, can all run on 5g, and we will have the capacity there to support all of these new connected IOT devices five years ago. These phones were the only things on the network. Nowadays, my watch has a sim card in it and needs to connect too. So this extra capacity of the next generation is really, really welcome, so Alex. What does all of this mean for us now? Well, on this motor g5g, it took me three seconds to download the Spotify app and two seconds to download the Netflix app in each of these apps.

It took me 53 seconds to download an entire Spotify playlist, which was 13 hours long and then over on the video streaming side of things. It took me only three seconds to download a single 40-minute episode of black mirror. Now I didn't want to stop the testing there. That was only one network in one city, EE in Lincoln, so I picked up a Vodafone, 5g, sim card traveled, 45 minutes all the way to Sheffield and then drove around Sheffield for about half an hour unable to find any 5g until yeah. I'm completely happy with that 250 megabits per second down on Vodafone's 5g network in Sheffield something a little more important than that, though I think is the ping, as you can see here, it came in at 25 milliseconds, which is perfectly respectable for even competitive online esports now 5g around a year ago, was in the news, and it wasn't getting the best press.

Some of the more notable stuff was people's battery lives on their phones when using 5g were absolutely awful, and on top of that, their phones were expelling heat. They were getting really, really hot. On the 5g network, but I have to say when I was out doing my test this morning, and it was test after test this phone was cold to the touch completely. It never felt warm and right now this morning I was on 100, and now we're on 83, and it is 3 o'clock in the afternoon, and I've been out hammering this thing doing: 5g speed tests all day, and it's literally lost 17 of its battery life. So all the claims about 5g being awful for your battery and making your phone overheat well, it seems Qualcomm have sorted that with the snapdragon 756g processor inside here, dual selfie camera.

It has an edge to edge screen that runs at hertz refresh it's buttery smooth and I think on the back here. It even has a quad camera system. Furthermore, it's got facial recognition, it has a fingerprint reader in the side of it, and you know what to top it all off. I actually really, really like this. It is a mid-range phone right, it's a mid-range phone, it's not going to break the bank, and it's got 5g.

I like this thing, but there you guys have it, that is the current state of the 5g network or the fifth generation of wireless technology. Here in the UK, I want to give a huge shout out to both uh Motorola and Qualcomm for working with me on this video and providing with me this phone to go out and do the testing, and it did it really, really well, like I say, no overheating battery life's great love, the phone love the 5g. I think we've had some really, really awesome results today, and they're really, really exciting for the future. I'm excited anyway, but for now mine has been Alex. This has been tech flow, we'll see in the next one.

You.

Source : TechFlow