Testing Verizon's 5G network in Chicago with the Galaxy S10 5G

[Shawn Knight]

In context: 5G and the phones needed to take advantage of blazing fast data transmission speeds are here but unless you are an early adopter with money to burn, there's no reason to buy a 5G-enabled smartphone at this stage. Service is only offered in a couple of cities and even then, really only within a small area in those regions. For most, it'll still be a while before 5G is even a possibility in your hometown.

Samsung’s recently launched Galaxy S10 5G is one of the first major flagship smartphones to ship with 5G technology baked in. Other handsets, like the Moto Z3, can also do 5G but require you to attach a special add-on.

At $1,299, though, is the 5G-enabled Galaxy S10 worth it? What sort of real-world speeds can you expect in the handful of cities that offer 5G service? Fortunately, some tech publications recently put the flagship to the test to help us answer these questions and more.

In downtown Chicago, Digital Trends never saw speeds in the Speedtest app dip below 550Mbps and the fastest was a blazing 1.35Gbps. CNET said it saw speeds consistently range from 400Mbps to above 1Gbps. Tech Radar hit a max speed of 1.385Gbps in its testing and PCMag clocked a 1.17Gbps test.

(Image courtesy Julian Chokkattu, Digital Trends)

The emerging trend here, of course, is that 5G – at least, in its current iteration in Chicago – is extremely inconsistent. The millimeter wave tech in use can deliver very fast speeds at low latency rates but has a low range and poor penetration. Unless you are close and within direct line-of-sight to a 5G node, you won’t get 5G service.

Lead image courtesy Jessica Dolcourt, CNET

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https://www.techspot.com/news/80129-testing-verizon-5g-network-chicago-galaxy-s10-5g.html

 

[amstech]

I am more interested in the 'average bandwidth and performance' then I am the max performance. I have 100mpbs (roughly 12.5MB down) with Spectrum, I get about 7-8MB down on average. Certain things like Steam downloads will pull close to max once in awhile though.
Great article and thanks for sharing.

 

[Impudicus]

How often do ya need to download anything big enough on your phone to need speeds like that? And how fast it's go tear through you data plan and then POW - Throttled!

 

[Eldritch]

How often do ya need to download anything big enough on your phone to need speeds like that? And how fast it's go tear through you data plan and then POW - Throttled!

No Telecom wants to talk about it but we the real consumers really don't care for even a Terabyte/sec internet if the data package is only couple of GBs.

 

[kapital98]

How often do ya need to download anything big enough on your phone to need speeds like that? And how fast it's go tear through you data plan and then POW - Throttled!

5g (like 4g) has serious potential to displace conventional forms of cable internet. From a capital perspective, it's much cheaper to have a low cost/high coverage system such as 5G than a capital intensive program like fiber optic cables everywhere. Especially in areas that don't already have traditional infrastructure.

Phone companies have consistently claimed with 3g and 4g that they didn't have the bandwidth to do those type of solutions at scale (at least not without massive government subsidies). That argument becomes harder and harder to justify with greater bandwidth.