On paper 5G is better: less power, better SNR, longer ranges.

The problem is the frequency spectrum: the higher the frequencies, the more bandwidth but the worst range. And it’s very crowded.

5G has been mostly deployed in the upper spectrum and mmwave in really crowded city downtowns, in part to show off the speeds reliably but also cell density and the fact there’s nothing on those frequencies, they can just deploy them. The problem is those gigabit speeds are only possible on the high frequencies, therefore it costs range. It’s exactly like 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz WiFi.

When it comes to the longer ranges, you want the lower frequencies, but the problem is the good spectrum is all used by TV, 3G and 4G already! And they’re long range so you need more spacing to prevent interference. So they have to deploy 5G on the less desirable spectrum, at least for now, until they can get rid of 3G in full and free up space for 5G on the lower bands. Technically 5G can also be mixed with 4G, but because it has to share you lose a lot of benefits when lots of 4G clients are connected, like the variable channel sizes and multiple devices talking at the same time.

So the real world result, currently, is sometimes it’s about as good because it’s sharing with 4G, sometimes it’s bad because it’s on the higher frequencies that can’t go through walls as well, and if you’re lucky, 3G has been fully removed and reallocated and you have pretty solid 5G. It was the same thing with 4G: 3G was taking the best spectrum, so 4G was originally often worse than 3G before they had enough 4G antennas and got rid of 2G and took its spectrum for 4G.

Plus, we know carriers are good at taking good tech and making it needlessly shitty our outright misleading like AT&T’s 5Ge thing or Comcast’s attempt at “10G” network. They’re rather your phone show the 5G logo than let you stay on 4G even if the signal is better there, and that makes people think 5G kinda sucks.

One of the things 5G wanted to accomplish is serve IoT devices far away with low power, by using small channels and low data rates without affecting the high bandwidth devices on the same tower. They thought about range and device count a lot this round. It’s just, faster is the feature people talk about the most, the rest is just technical stuff is a bit too hard to digest for the average consumer.