4G vs LTE vs 5G? What's the difference?

there's been lots of talk about 5g coming but most people probably don't even know what that means and there's other terms as well that we've seen such as lte which just kind of is a term that came out of the blue one day and it's like what does that mean is it 4g is it better than 4g that's all the stuff that i'm going to be answering today in hopefully a way that is pretty easy to understand now first before we start i need to get one thing out of the way which is a mistake that i see so many people making and you need to understand that 5g cellular has nothing to do with 5 gigahertz wi-fi when we're talking about routers in your home that do wi-fi those are going to be using two different frequency bands 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz which a lot of times companies and people will incorrectly refer to these as 2.4 g and 5g but that's not correct it's gigahertz and so it's kind of understandable why this might be confusing so just understand that the 5g i'm going to be mentioning in this video is a completely different thing unrelated to wi-fi the 5g cellular doesn't even use the 5 gigahertz spectrum so it's a totally different technology frequency you get the idea so with that out of the way let's get into what the g does mean so we're talking about 3g 4g 5g that g is going to refer to the generation of the cellular network technology so it's more than just how much faster it is just because it's a new generation doesn't mean it's just faster there's a lot more that goes into it different protocols different specifications for minimums and maximums and maybe even different frequencies usually there's a lot different things to it and historically it's been that a new cellular generation comes around every 10 years or so and we are kind of coming up on that in about 2020 and usually these new cellular generations are going to require new hardware and stuff so they are very different now i would say that 3g is probably the first one that many people kind of became aware of because there was the iphone 3g and then people were like oh what's this 3g thing oh it's a type of cellular technology and speed so that's what we're going to mention quickly even though it's not really super relevant anymore and 3g when it first came out was actually pretty darn slow it had a speed of around 200 kilobits per second so yes that would be 0.2 megabits per second extremely slow however over time the 3g technology did improve and these days 3g can be anywhere up to like 20 megabits per second or more and this improved technology is usually called 3.5 g or even 3.75 g to show that it's better than the original 3g that being said though companies still typically do refer to it just as 3g they don't bring out the 3.5 gene all that it's probably too confusing so just know even if you see that icon drop down to 3g or something it doesn't mean it's incredibly slow as when 3g first came out it's probably faster than you think so it might not be that bad but in any case 3g is pretty much old news these days so let's not dwell on it so the next big one would be 4g fourth generation and of course this replaced 3g and like the others the 4g spec is a specification which means that it kind of defines minimum requirements what kind of technology frequencies it uses all sorts of standards so it's not just referring to like what companies use oh this equipment over here is 4g stuff it's that plus a bunch of definitions for what exactly should we call things that are 4g or does it not qualify as 4g and that's going to apply to every generation and these specifications are typically drawn up by a organization called itu international telecommunications union and for 4g they drafted up requirements that have 4g as a spec that goes up to about 1 000 megabits down and 500 megabits up as the typical max ideal that does not obviously mean that every phone is going to get that in most cases it certainly does not but that's like kind of the ideal maximum but 4g does have a minimum spec of 100 megabits download speed now that is going to be important and we'll talk about that in a second because i'm sure a lot of you are thinking wait a minute 4g i have 4g or 4g lte and i don't get 100 megabits per second or i had 4g you know years ago and i certainly wasn't getting 100 megabits per second until recently maybe and that is true and the story behind that is obviously when 4g was announced as a specification per second was completely unheard of for cellular technology no company could even do it so they had this new spec and they were used to doing 3g but 4g was just like impossible for them to do because it was a minimum of 100 they couldn't do it so even though these companies were kind of creating this network with all sorts of 4g compatible equipment they were revamping all their cell towers and stuff to be 4g compatible they weren't able to actually get that speed so technically they weren't able to say they had a 4g network even though it was very much greatly improved which is kind of a problem so because getting to that minimum spec of 4g would take a while a new term was created 4g lte which you'll see all over the place now the lte stands for long-term evolution so the full name is 4th generation long-term evolution and this term was meant to be used to represent kind of an improvement towards the 4g spec so itu that union organization basically said okay if your company and you are able to provide speeds that are much much faster than 3g but not quite at 4g truly then you can call it this long-term evolution to show that you're evolving towards 5g so here's a mind blower 4g lte technically is not 4g because it doesn't get up to that spec it's more like 4g well not really but we're working on it and it's still better than 3g so this is why you pretty much never will see an advertisement by a cell company that just says 4g it's almost always going to say 4g lte because they can't necessarily advertise 4g if it's not up to that spec and if you're wondering wait a minute that's stupid because they're still calling it 4g lte why would they add something onto it if it's not the original thing in the first place yes it is stupid and get ready because it's about to get a lot dumber even still and here's where it gets even a little bit more confusing because the next step in the 4g story is 4g lte a or 4g lte advanced and like lte 4g lte advanced is just another improvement on the spec towards the ideal maximum of one gig down 500 megabits up it's not quite there yet it's just another improvement over a regular lte but the thing is the lte advanced spec also has a minimum speed of 100 megabits per second like the regular 4g spec so technically yes 4g lte a sometimes called 4g lte plus could technically just be called 4g however lte advanced will probably never just be called 4g because of marketing reasons i mean up until now people probably assume well 4g lte that's a thing added on to 4g it must mean it's better than 4g which is the exact opposite of the case because regular 4g has not existed until now and with the whole 5g coming it's probably not even worth it to try and educate the masses so they're probably just going to be calling it lte advanced or lte plus it just makes a lot more sense in people's heads as a side note you guys might remember my other video and you've probably seen a lot of articles talking about att's fake 5g where they kind of wanted to leapfrog in front of the competition and lie and they started calling their lte advanced 5g e as in 5g evolution so in the ultimate irony as att finally is able to get speeds that can truly be called 4g they decide to instead lie and call it 5g it's not 5g at all it's just 4g in its truest form they're just kind of like skipping a generation it's ridiculous so i'm not going to get into that if you want to see my other video i'll probably put a link pop out or something like that just know that 5g e from a t not 5g at all it's 4g so before we get to 5g let's quickly go over what we just talked about 4g in a summary kind of way so in the beginning the 4g specification was created it was just a definition and said if you want to call your speeds 4g you have to use this type of technology and get these speeds so companies could not do that so they created 4g lte which meant faster than 3g but were working on getting it to real 4g after some time passed they improved upon that even further and they got to 4g lte advanced which actually can be considered 4g but they're not going to call it that because it would be too confusing so now finally on to 5g like the generations before in its truest form it's just a specification that says this is what the ideal speed would be and it also has a minimum speed as well so again it's not just that 5g is faster than 4g and that's it it has other features such as much lower latency it also has higher capacity for bandwidth and higher capacity for number of devices and it does actually have a much much faster upper limit ideal of 20 gigabits per second per device and it does have a minimum as well of one gigabit per second so to be 5g it has to be a gigabit per second minimum and as for that latency it has to be around one millisecond latency which is extremely low and with having a latency that low that actually introduces a completely new use for 5g that was not really possible before and that is home internet home internet usually if it's hardwired obviously it's going to have a lot lower latency than what we used to have with 4g where you know you'd send the signal to the cell tower it might have latencies of like 100 milliseconds or something like that if it's one millisecond you could literally use that as your standard internet with no lag on anything so that's what a lot of companies are actually doing when they're first rolling out 5g in cities and that's exactly what verizon did for example they rolled out a 5g modem that you hook up to a router or they provide you with one and then the 5g signal is your home internet you don't have to go to the cable company to get a fiber line or a coaxial line it's coming over the air and yes these companies are actually providing the minimum true gigabit requirement so you're getting wireless gigabit for your home and it is important to understand that 5g is such in early stages that it is pretty much just being tested out in a very select number of cities just for home internet it's not being used in phones at all i don't think there is a single phone on the market that supports 5g or if it does then you couldn't use it anyway because no companies have rolled out cellular for 5g that works with phones only for home so we probably will not actually see real 5g rolling out in any meaningful way until next year like 2020 so i don't expect the new iphone or any other phones to have 5g it wouldn't even make sense no one would be able to use it they're probably just going to save costs and just release it when it's actually usable so hopefully that does clear up exactly the differences besides just being faster and you can now understand the different kind of sub classifications of the different generations that we had like 4g lte lt advance it's kind of a mess but i think i might have explained in a way that hopefully you guys understand let me know in the comments if you did understand it it'd be great to hear from you if you want to check out some other videos i have i'll just put them right here you can just click on those so until next time guys be seeing you

Channel: ThioJoe

Views: 430,276

Keywords: technology, tech, 4g, 5g, lte, 4g lte, what is 4g lte, 4g vs lte, 4g vs 4g lte, lte vs 5g, 4g lte vs 5g, 3g, long term evolution, wireless, internet, mobile, data, network, speed, mobile internet, mobile network, cellular network

Id: E77Uzni_uRE

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 20 2019