Until now the 5G industry has spread a lot of hype, but it hasn’t affected customers. That’s all starting to change as the cellular carriers are starting to offer 5G phones. Many customers who spend extra for 5G phones are going to quickly be frustrated and disappointed as they try to participate in the new 5G world.
Consider both AT&T and T-Mobile. Both companies are introducing both a low-band and a high-band 5G phone and customers who want 5G will have to choose one of the two options because the carriers don’t offer a phone that handles both new sets of spectrum.
In AT&T’s case, the low-band phone will introduce 850 MHz spectrum while the high-band phone will use millimeter wave spectrum. The T-Mobile low-band phone will use 600 MHz spectrum with the high-band phone will use millimeter wave spectrum.
Customers buying any of these phones are likely to be disappointed. The high-band phones only work outdoors and when a customer is within range of a handful of millimeter wave hotspots, which are mostly in downtown areas of major cities. Unless somebody has a job that keeps them outside within a small downtown urban footprint, the new high-band phones will default to 4G LTE. Even where a customer is within range of the millimeter wave spectrum it’s been reported that the signal gets easily blocked when a customer turns a corner around a building or even sometimes when the customer’s body blocks the path to the cell site.
Customers of the low-band phones are also likely to be disappointed. The two new low-band spectrums being used are great at penetrating buildings, and so data coverage might improve indoors. However, low-band spectrum, by definition, doesn’t carry a lot of bandwidth. A customer with a low-band 5G phone will likely get data speeds similar to 4G LTE. That is predicated upon living or working close to cell sites that have been upgraded to the new low-band spectrum – because many cell sites won’t yet carry the new spectrum.
There might be a short period of time where a customer with a low-band phone sees better performance – but that will be because they will be one of the few users of the new spectrum. As the more people use the new spectrum bands, the performance will look like that in similar bands of spectrum. I remember how early customers with 4G LTE praised the fast speeds, but those fast speeds fell back to normal within a short period of time.
The real bang with low-band spectrum will come in a few years after the cellular carriers perfect and integrate dynamic spectrum sharing into the 5G architecture. This is one of the new 5G features that let the cellular carriers combine multiple frequencies into a single data path to a customer. Today, a customer with one of the low-band phones will either be using the new low-band spectrum or traditional 4G LTE spectrum – but not both at the same time. The other benefit of the lower spectrum bands is that the spectrum will travel farther from a cell site, albeit at slower speeds.
The new phones will be confusing to customers for another reason – customers won’t be able to use these new phones to change carriers. A phone that can receive AT&T’s 850 MHz spectrum is not going to receive T-Mobile’s 600 MHz spectrum. A customer changing carriers with one of the new phones is going to only get traditional 4G LTE at a different carrier. This is going to become the new norm for the next decade as the carriers start using drastically different bands of spectrum.
Unfortunately, the cellular companies aren’t being straight with customers and are touting these new phones as high-performance 5G. The phones are not yet 5G since they don’t incorporate the best new features of the 5G standards – instead, they are 4G LTE phones that are adding new choices of spectrum. Perhaps the new phones can be labeled as 4.1 G, but I think even that would be generous.
The other big problem with the first generation of phones is that they will be obsolete once the carriers start adding the new 5G functions. 5G has a lot of great features coming including dynamic spectrum sharing (combines multiple frequencies), frequency slicing (gives each customer a data connection to match what they are trying to do), and the ability to connect to more than one cellular tower. This is going to be a problem between now and the time that 5G is mature – any 5G phone already in use won’t be able to handle any new feature as it’s introduced. Every 5G phone sold for the next decade will almost instantly be obsolete in terms of not being able to use new features.
I’m not sure why anybody would shell out extra to buy a 5G phones today. There might be a few people that have a specific reason to use the new spectrum and who happen to live in the right place to be able to use it. However, the vast majority of people are going to be disappointed since they are likely to have paid extra for a phone that’s still going to be 4G LTE. I know people like bragging rights by having the latest tech toy – but somebody buying a 5G phone is more of a sucker than an innovator. They will have bought into the carriers’ 5G hype – hook, line, and sinker.
