Craig discusses 5G and explains how it works why what you may have heard about 5G speeds might have a bit misleading.

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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:

Are you as excited about five G as I am? I got some good news and I got some bad news and we're going to explain 5g here because five G, isn't five G, isn't five G. Why is Europe so much faster?

Hey everybody. Thanks for tuning in. You're listening to Craig Peterson.

five G held open a couple of different promises. One of the big promises of five G was that it could handle way more devices than 4g can handle.

It isn't just because it's using IPV six. For those of you who are a little more technical, five G is designed to handle microdevices by the billions. So we're talking about having your coat, for instance, hooked up to the five G network. You might have the new Apple watch six and that Apple watch six has built into it a cell modem. Exactly. So it doesn't need your phone anymore. Your iPhone, it can talk directly to the cell towers. It can take a phone call, can send a phone call. Let's just like Dick Tracy. You can even have videos, so cool. You open up your camera and you can see what your camera sees right there on your watch and you can control your camera. I am just so impressed by it. It Is such a cool device as well as being just an amazing device for tracking all your health, but I digress.

So in the five G world, the idea is that you could have millions of devices, just the Apple watch, which is not 5g by the way the watch six is not 5g, but you could have millions of these devices in the 4g world.

It was never really intended to, for an individual to basically have a couple of dozen or a few dozen or more devices. To start thinking about it, you've got a smart car. It could have one or more five G modems in it so that it can call into the dealer in advance and say, Hey, I'm having this problem that you could have a technician diagnose it remotely, which is already happening, Then you have your, Levi trucker jacket on, which is also getting the weather report. To know if it should be heating itself up charging itself, you're just everything. You name it? I'm just, I'm thinking about all the devices. You won't in the future be able to buy a laptop that does not have internet built into it that doesn't need wifi anymore. The other side of five G when we're talking about not needing wifi anymore is the speed. Five G is promising up to gigahertz bandwidth, which is wow. Gigabit bandwidth is absolutely amazing. How fast is your internet on your phone right now? So what you can do is on your phone, or even on your regular laptop, desktop tablet, whatever. See if you can find an app called speed, test.net speed test.net and not just the app, but see if there is just the website. So if you're on a regular computer, I can just go to the web, and then at speed test.net, I'm going to pull it up right now. Speed test. I have that right. They're actually on my phone.

So it's by. and they'll go and try and find the optimal server, and then you can hit the go button. So now it'll connect to that server. It's going to download some big files and it's going to upload some big files and it's looking at a couple of different things. It's looking at ping time, which is how fast it can get from you to the remote server and then back and that's in milliseconds. Typically it's also measuring jitter and jitters important if you are using it for video conferencing. So if you've had problems with the phone that kind of breaking up a little bit sounding were dropping. That's probably a jitter problem. Speed tests will tell you about your jitter and w how much loss you've had, how much data loss, how many packets just did not make it to the other end.

So I'm running it right now. No. I don't want you guys to get upset with me, but I've got fiber lines coming in here, dedicated fiber business fiber lines. So my phone right now is showing a download speed of 229 million bits per second. So 229 megabits upload of 236 megabits. So that's called symmetrical.

It's basically the same speed. Up as it is down. A lot of us, if we're using cable modems, we'll have something called asymmetrical and our work upload speed will be about a 10th of our download speed. That's absolutely normal and sometimes it'll be faster than that, but these cable modems and some of the other services are designed for basically for web browsing. When you look at the TCP protocol overhead, it's about the same as that, about 10% up versus your downloads. So three milliseconds, Andy is my pink time, which is really quite fast. I remember for my first ethernet networks, we had 10 megabits thick wired ethernet. And I'm trying to remember, I think a hundred milliseconds was wow on a local network.

So this is three milliseconds and my jitter is 0.23 milliseconds. So excellent lines. And these types of speeds that we're talking about here on fiber for me are the types of speed that they want to get to with five G. Think about that, think about being able to get these quarter gigabit or all the way up to gigabits speeds just on your smartphone or your laptop or your I pad or your car or whatever it might be.

That's the other big promise of five G right? There's a company out there called open signal and I'm looking into some of the five G's statistics. They checked average speeds in a dozen countries. These are based on people going to like speed test.net type stuff. It's just, it's not a great sampling.

It's people who self-identified right. Put up their hands. Yeah. I want to be involved, but these were conducted between May 16 and August 14. So over the course of a few months, And the United States came in deadline last of the 12 countries in five G speeds with 10 of the 11 other countries posting five G speeds that at least doubled those of the US. So the question is why is the average five-speed in the United States about 50 megabits per second. Okay. Why are these other countries out more than a hundred megabits? A second? it has to do with the providers who are the providers that actually have five G here in the US and which of those providers are able to have a big enough footprint that people can relate.

Tested. the only provider that pretty much has coast to coast, five G right now is T-Mobile and T-Mobile's a company that I use and it's not the best for general coverage, is up in Lincoln, New Hampshire here last weekend and there are a lot of areas where I had no coverage. Verizon has a lot of coverage all over, even in some of these weaker areas and they tend to be more expensive.

M,y T-Mobile plan is a business plan. And then I don't get paid by any of these guys on getting kickbacks nothing. Okay. Okay. So what you're getting from me is my absolute truth here. What I have seen well, Teen mobile is using a lower frequency that is being used in these other countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, who had some of the best speeds out there, and Australia as well.

And remember, these are self-selected people, right? These are people that know they have 5g. They tend to be a little more techie, which means they are probably in larger urban areas. That's where the problem starts coming in. T-Mobile's 5g at a lower frequency, more easily penetrates glass and walls, right? Wood walls, drywall, et cetera. That's typically what I want.

Versus Verizon, that's running at much higher frequencies. And last I checked, I think they were suing because they were upset that the FCC sold and gave these frequencies to T-Mobile, but they are running on much higher frequencies, which means they can deliver higher bandwidth because that frequency gives them the ability to have a lot more variants in their signal, which ultimately translates into more bandwidth for you.

Now, I have an advanced class amateur radio license if you've listened for a while. And so I studied this stuff and I know a fair amount about it, frankly. I was one of the first people involved in packet radio here in the United States, way back when I still have some old equipment. So I, this is stuff that I know about. So the Verizon just signals cannot pay trade as well, which means they're going to have even. More cell sites in the five G world.

We're not talking about cell sites that are on these huge towers. As much as we're talking about cell sites that are mounted on buildings and even homes all over creation. Verizon's other problem right now is they don't have a whole lot of coverage. They've got five G coverage in some major cities and even then it's only in some areas of those major cities.

So once Verizon's totally rolled out, if you're living in a fairly populated area, you're probably going to get a faster data path through Verizon, then you'd get through T-Mobile. However, with T-Mobile, you're going to be more likely to have a signal pretty much anywhere because the T-Mobile signals also go further because they're lower frequencies.

So think about that. People my age. Do you remember am and listening to am at night and you got the bounce off the ionosphere and is really cool? You could listen to somebody on the other side of the country and sometimes even on the other side of the world. It was so cool. I still have short wave radios I listen to.

It still blows my mind. It's something I've loved since I was a little kid. I and made my first little cat's whisker radio, crystal radio way back when.

So that's, what's going to happen here. We'll see how things actually end up flushing out. But the other side of this is based on the type of phone you have, you may be restricted to a specific carrier. So we're going back to the old days. Because the frequencies are so far apart and the less expensive phones they're going to be dedicated to certain carriers. So keep that in mind as well. When you're looking to buy your new phone.

All right, stick around. We are going to be back here. We're going to talk about an unfixable flaw that Apple has this hardware security where it's going. Verizon sent out a new wake up call, Android malware, some new tricks on that front, and you can find it all online@craigpeterson.com.

Stick around.

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5G Speeds and What is Really going on plus more on this Tech Talk with Craig Peterson Podcast