5G: Explained!

foreigner foreigner so I got a little curious watching all these videos on my sub box over the last few months of people being brought to Chicago to test 5G and do all these crazy speed tests, but then I started noticing that everyone has a couple of things in common, but it actually made me curious about the whole thing, so I bought a 5G phone and then I drove to the nearest 5G city and tried it for myself, so this is my new Samsung Galaxy S10 5G 1 600 on Verizon, the team and I drove from the studio to the nearest 5G city, which is Providence Rhode Island, so for those unfamiliar, a quick explanation of what 5G is.

Well, we all have 4G. Now 5G is the fifth generation of wireless network technology, so all the big operators are working on building their 5G networks right now Verizon on T Sprint we are all working on 5G the main theme of 5G is speed again each new generation of wireless networks is significantly faster and more capable than the previous ones, some of you may remember the old and very slow 2G and 3G and how much better 4G is than 5G represents another step forward, so to take advantage of the 5G you need a 5G device with 5G radios and a 5G network, so for me that's the Galaxy S10 5G and it's Verizon building their 5G network in certain cities, one place at a time, so you can't just get one software update on a 4G phone to enable 5G, that's right.

I'm T-ing you changing people's status bars to say 5ge when it's actually just 4G, it's stupid, it's basically a lie, you're trying to trick people into thinking they have 5G. 5ge is not 5G, it's still 4G, it's really a shame anyway, 5G is based on what is called millimeter waves, it's a new section. of a very high frequency spectrum, from 20 gigahertz to about 96 gigahertz, but the problem is that the higher the frequency of any wave, the smaller the range, as if that were the truth on paper, for the same reason that 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi does not. It doesn't travel as far as 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi, the same reason microwaves don't cook things on the other side of the glass wall, that's the same reason 5G doesn't travel as well through the real world, so the biggest problem with millimeter waves is that even if you're standing pretty close to the node, like a few hundred feet away, it really only travels well within direct line of sight, so things such as trees, walls and buildings block and interrupt the high frequency signal even if you are still close to it.

I'd even heard that rain in the air could be a problem, so I wanted to try this out for myself, so we drove to Providence Rhode Island, which is on Verizon's growing list of 5G cities; It is not the entire city that is one. great 5G hotbed, just certain areas a little hidden are near Brown University, where we found one of them and we found it by finding one of these, this is a 5G node or three nodes to be specific on the top of a pole of light. You could tell because it said Verizon right on the pole and because if you stand right next to it with a 5G phone in your hand and do a speed test, the results are absolutely ridiculous, 4G and the notification bar changes to say 5G and you open the application of your choice and run a speed test and I see easy 700 800 900, often well over a thousand megabits per second.

The highest download result I saw in my personal testing was 1.9 gigabits per second briefly from fast.com, that's just That's incredibly fast, like you can almost use your entire data limit in a minute. Dream speeds, very very nice, of course you want to see what this kind of speed is really for, other than for a speed test, so YouTube videos play instantly. without any buffering in HD you could fast forward from the beginning, no problems, web browsing of course would be super fast. Jump to Play Store to download a gigantic game like pubg mobile, the progress moves quite quickly, not like the blink of an eye, and that's it. but it's still much better than it would be on LTE, the Fortnite downloader progressed faster than the Fortnite installer would have, meaning it's incredibly impressive and downloading a full episode of Stranger Things from Netflix in HD on this phone it took about four seconds, so you could capture it in its entirety. season in probably about 30 seconds if you wanted to, which again is absolutely ideal, but again here's the thing, this is all while you're standing right next to the Tower with a direct line of sight, you know perfectly well, ideal conditions, great weather once I left him, so kind. it broke down pretty quickly so right around the corner of this brick building just to go into shadow literally maybe 75 feet away from the node but behind a wall I'm getting a lot slower. 5G, it's still 5G, but you can see the numbers here.

Now I mean, it's a little crazy to call 200 300 400 slowly, but compared to what I was getting before, that's a pretty big difference, basically cutting your speed in half just by walking a couple feet down the block and also notice it just by walking halfway. At the end of the block it would start jumping back and forth between 4G and 5G and, as if frustratingly inconsistent, even when I had line of sight with maybe a tree or two nearby, my phone would drop the 5G and then go back to jump and you can see it in the notification bar it would go back to 5G and then it would go back to 4G and then when I was on 5G and I ran the speed test it would be great it would go back down a thousand which is amazing but when I ran on 4G I would get 4G speeds and they are really good 4G speeds but it was weird getting those results back to back like half a block away and when I waited a minute suddenly I was getting 5G again and I was getting a thousand less, what's up?

The solution to this, as we understand it, is basically just putting a lot of nodes everywhere, essentially to maximize coverage and improve the technology, so that when you move behind an obstacle or drive through a city, you actively switch between the nodes that can connect like we do now with 4G towers, but much faster and I think that's the part that scares people. It seems like a brute force way to fix the problem, but that's the current plan. covering areas with these lower power cells that allow you to switch between them very, very quickly instead of a giant 4G tower like you have now.

My intuition is that an infrastructure where you cover an entire city and eventually an entire country in these small nodes is going to work. It will be incredibly expensive and will probably take a long time, like years, so it's a long way off, but here's another thing to note, even with me standing right next to a 5G node and holding a new 2019 5G phone, there were still some drawbacks. what to notice The main three are heating the battery and charging, so on the one hand, charging seems to still happen at 4G speed, even when I'm connected to 5G.

I never got over 100 megabits per second in all my testing, which is still a great speed, but it's my dream. Uploading an 8K YouTube video in about five seconds or live streaming a high resolution VR or something isn't possible at all, but now you've probably also noticed that the Ping is still at 4G levels, the goal is to reduce this to a millisecond or less, but that's also not happening yet in these tests and then heat and battery are something that this phone seemed to specifically suffer from when I was testing. I started my day when we arrived in Providence with 75 Battery, did all my testing. and that took maybe four or five hours and when we were done I had 21 batteries and the phone was hot to the touch the entire time.

That's why you see the 5G versions of phones that come out almost always have a larger battery than their regular 4G. Brothers, including the Galaxy S10 5G, and the phone also got hot during testing when I wasn't even gaming or doing anything graphic intensive, just watching some YouTube videos and downloading tests was a bit worrying, so the final 5G result is like foldable phones right now. in 2019 it's clearly not ready yet, but when you use it and you get the right use case and you're in the right space, you get this amazing little glimpse into the future that you wish was ready for right now because it's cool, but it's not. es and currently the cons outweigh the pros and I wouldn't spend extra money on it right now in 2019.

The future of 5G is really bright assuming you know the infrastructure works and isn't too bothersome and that's a big assumption. but then we're talking about virtual reality streaming and networks of self-driving cars that are all connected to the internet and talking to each other and maybe even thinking about remote surgery with a 5G connected robot in one country with a doctor here and a patient in another country. and everything works perfectly, like all this super high bandwidth and low latency, maybe the end of video buffering seems possible, but as of now in 2019 it's not ready yet, but I'm super ready for when be it in any way.

Thanks for watching guys on the next one. Many thanks to nordvpn for sponsoring this video. So what is a VPN? A virtual private network protects your Internet traffic, encrypts it, and routes it through a remote server while changing your original IP address. Protect your data from anyone trying to spy on it. Privacy is one of the biggest concerns online and with how much I travel, especially lately, and how much I use public Wi-Fi and hotel Wi-Fi, a VPN seems like a no-brainer, so nordvpn. for sponsoring they offer 75 off plus an extra month free for using the code mkvpn, so if you're even the slightest bit concerned about your online security and privacy, take the first step and check out nordvpn, thanks for watching, see you later.