5G: Explained!

foreign [Music] [Music] foreign so I got kind of curious with seeing all these videos in my sub box over the past couple months of people getting taken to Chicago to test 5G and doing all these crazy speed tests um but then I started to notice they all sort of have a couple things in common but really it was just getting me curious about the whole thing so I bought a 5G phone and then I drove to the nearest 5G City and I tried it for myself so this is my new 1 600 Samsung Galaxy S10 5G on Verizon and so the crew and I drove from the studio to the nearest 5G city which is Providence Rhode Island so for those unfamiliar a brief explainer what is 5G well we all have 4G now 5G is the fifth generation of wireless network technology and so all the big carriers are working on building out their 5G networks right now Verizon at T Sprint we're all working on 5G the main theme of 5G is again speed every new generation of the wireless networks are significantly faster and more capable than the previous some of you may remember the old and very slow 2G and 3G and how much better 4G is than those 5G represents another step forward so to take advantage of 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 who's building up their 5G Network in certain cities one location at a time so you can't just get a software update to a 4G phone to just enable 5G that's right I'm talking to you at T changing people's status bars to say 5ge when it's really just 4G it's stupid it's basically a lie you're kind of trying to trick people into thinking they got 5G 5ge is not 5G it's still 4G it's really a shame anyway 5G is built on what's called millimeter waves it's a new section of very high frequency spectrum upwards of 20 gigahertz all the way to near 96 gigahertz but the catch is the higher the frequency of any wave the lesser the range like that's just the truth on paper so for the same reason 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi 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 millimeter waves biggest problem is that even if you're standing pretty close to the node like a couple hundred feet away it only really travels well within direct line of sight so things like trees and walls and buildings block and disrupt The High Frequency signal even if you're still close to it I've heard even that rain in the air could potentially be a problem so this is why I wanted to test this for myself so we drove to Providence Rhode Island which is on the growing list of Verizon's 5G cities it's not the whole city that's one big 5G hotbed it's only certain areas sort of tucked away happens to be 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 at the top of a light pole 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 run a speed test the results are just absolutely ridiculous the 4G and the notification bar switches to indicate 5G and you open up your app of choice and run a speed test and I'm seeing easy 700 800 900 often well above a thousand megabits per second download highest result I actually saw in my personal testing was 1.9 gigabits per second briefly from fast.com that's just that's that's just hilariously fast like you could almost use your whole data cap in a minute um dream like speeds very very nice of course you want to see what this type of speed is actually good for other than a speed test so YouTube videos just played instantly without any buffering in HD I could fast forward right off the bat no problem web browsing of course would be super fast hopping into the Play Store to download a gigantic game like pubg mobile progress moves pretty fast not like a blink of an eye and it's done but still miles better than it would be on LTE the fortnite downloader progressed faster than the fortnite installer would have meaning it's it's crazy impressive and downloading an entire Stranger Things episode from Netflix in HD on this phone took about four seconds so you could grab a whole season in probably like 30 seconds if you wanted to which is again absolutely ideal but again here's the thing this is all while standing like right next to the Tower with a direct line of sight you know perfectly ideal conditions great weather once I left that it kind of broke down pretty quickly so right around the corner of this brick building just to get into the shade so literally maybe 75 feet away from the node but behind a wall I'm getting much slower 5G it's still 5G but you can see the numbers here now I mean it's kind of crazy to call 200 300 400 down slow but compared to what I was getting before that's a pretty big difference to basically cut your speed in half just by walking a couple meters down the block and also notice just by walking halfway down the block I'd start bouncing back and forth between 4G and 5G and like it was frustratingly inconsistent even when I did have a line of sight with maybe a tree or two sort of nearby my phone would drop 5G and then jump back on again and you can see it in the notification bar it would drop back to 5G and then back to 4G and then when I was on 5G and I ran the speed test it would be great I get a thousand down again which is awesome but when I ran it at 4G I would get 4G speeds and it's really good 4G speeds but it was just weird getting those results back to back like half a block away and when I waited a minute I'd suddenly get 5G again and get a thousand down so what's the solution for this well as we understand it basically just putting a lot of nodes all over the place so essentially to maximize coverage and improve technology so that when you move behind one obstacle or sort of drive through a city you actively switch between nodes that you can connected to kind of like we do now with 4G towers but just much faster and I think that's the part that kind of scares people it seems Seems like a Brute Force way to actually go about fixing the problem but that's the current plan is to just blanket areas with these lower powered cells that let you switch between them very very quickly instead of one giant 4G Tower like you have now my gut feeling is that an infrastructure where you cover an entire city and eventually an entire country in these little nodes is going to be incredibly expensive and probably take a very long time like years so it's a long way off but here's another thing to notice even with me standing right next to a 5G node and holding a brand new 2019 5G phone there were still some drawbacks to notice the main three are heat battery and upload so for one the upload appears to still be happening at 4G speed even when I'm connected to 5G I never broke 100 megabits per second up in all my testing which is still a great speed but my dream of uploading an 8K YouTube video in like five seconds or going live streaming high resolution VR or something like that are not possible at all yet now you've probably also noticed the Ping is still at 4G levels too the goal is to get this down to a millisecond or less but that isn't happening yet in these tests either 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 got to Providence with 75 Battery did all my testing and that maybe took about four or five hours and when we finished I was at 21 battery and the phone was warm to the touch the whole time this is why you see 5G versions of phones coming out almost always have a larger battery than their normal 4G Brothers including the Galaxy S10 5G and the phone getting warm during the testing too when I wasn't even gaming or doing anything graphically intensive just watching some YouTube videos and download tests was a little concerning so the bottom line 5G is like folding phones right now in 2019 clearly not ready yet but when you use it and you get just the right use case and you're at just the right space you get this amazing little glimpse into the future that you wish was ready for right now because it's so great but it's not and currently the cons sort of 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 happens and isn't too obtrusive and that's a big assumption but then we're talking virtual reality streaming and networks of autonomous cars that are all internet connected and talking to each other and maybe even think about remote surgery with a 5G connected robot in one country with a doctor over here and a patient in another country and everything just working seamlessly like all this super high bandwidth low latency stuff maybe the end of video buffering altogether all seem possible but as of right now in 2019 it just isn't ready yet but I'm super ready for when it is either way thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace big thanks to nordvpn for sponsoring this video so what is a VPN a virtual private Network secures your internet traffic encrypts it and routes it through a remote server while changing your original IP address so essentially it protects your data from anyone trying to Snoop 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 feels like a no-brainer so nordvpn for sponsoring is offering 75 off plus one additional month free for using the code mkvpn so if you're even a tiny bit worried about your online security and privacy take the first step and check out nordvpn thanks for watching catch you later

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 9,409,481

Keywords: 5G, 5G explained, speedtest, 5G speed, 5G speed test, Verizon, Verizon 5G, Sprint 5G, T-Mobile 5G, AT&T 5G, 5GE, MKBHD, 5G testing, 5G tests, 5G network, 5G phone, 5G phone india, 5G vs 4G, 5G race, coronavirus, 5g coronavirus, covid, covid-19, covid 19

Id: _CTUs_2hq6Y

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ggill1313]

No :( I wish I could have met him!

[u/appslap]

Really cool he came here, seems like 5G has some hurdles that will be expensive and a pain to do

[u/evanparker]

his video opinions often seem kind of bought and paid for, but he does generally seem like one of the more even keeeled and technical reviewer type youtubers. I think he is probably seems like a nice guy too. He's pretty good.