[kendi]

Originally Posted by Choro&Swing

The answer is no, there won’t. So don’t rush out to buy a new phone with the best 5G connectivity or seek out the company with the best 5G network.

I’ve just read a review of the new Apple iPhone 12 in the NYTimes, and here is what I learned about 5G—no matter what phone you may use.

“Here are the two versions of 5G in a nutshell:

There’s ultrafast 5G, which is called millimeter wave. (Verizon labels it “5G Ultra Wideband.”) It travels very short distances and has trouble penetrating obstacles and walls. That makes it usable in outdoor spaces like street corners or parks, but probably not in our offices or homes anytime soon. Because of that, only tiny slivers of the country now have superfast 5G.

“Then there’s “5G Nationwide,” which is more widely available. It travels much farther, but carriers have said it will be only about 20 percent faster than 4G wireless networks.”

“. . . in San Francisco. While ultrafast 5G relies on access to light poles, most of the city’s utilities infrastructure is underground. Verizon’s progress to deploy 5G has run into red tape, she said.

“When I tested the new iPhones on the vanilla 5G network, any speed improvement was hardly noticeable. In the best cases, vanilla 5G was twice as fast as 4G, or 209 megabits a second compared with 103 megabits on 4G. But in some locations, 5G was slower than 4G. In one part of the Mission district, for instance, 5G speeds reached 28 megabits a second compared with 39 megabits on 4G.”

So, there will never be ultrafast 5G in The Villages because we have underground utilities rather than thousands of poles where the 5G boxes can be installed every hundred yards or so (very unlike cell towers). I think I’m unlikely to ever be anywhere where the fastest version is available, and I don’t think that even the slow version will ever make it to The Villages. So buy a new phone if you want, but NOT because it is set up for 5G.

A non issue imo. Faster is not always better.