Will there ever be ultrafast 5G cell phone coverage in The Villages?

[MandoMan]

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.

[Altavia]

Really? T-Mobile is deploying 5G here now.

T-Mobile (inc. Sprint) 3G / 4G / 5G coverage in The Villages, United States - nPerf.com (https://www.nperf.com/en/map/US/4175179.The-Villages/85.T-Mobile-inc-Sprint/signal/)

[shut the front door]

Really? T-Mobile is deploying 5G here now.

T-Mobile (inc. Sprint) 3G / 4G / 5G coverage in The Villages, United States - nPerf.com (https://www.nperf.com/en/map/US/4175179.The-Villages/85.T-Mobile-inc-Sprint/signal/)

I would take their coverage map with a grain of salt. I couldn't even get T-Mobile coverage in their own store! The employee was quite embarrassed.

[OrangeBlossomBaby]

I think 5G will get here, right around the time 8G is replaced everywhere else with 9G.

[mrf6969]

How fast do we really need? I find that my old iphone 6S is super fast as it is. My Xfinity 200 Mbps is fast. We all need to take a breath and slow down a bit.

[Altavia]

I would take their coverage map with a grain of salt. I couldn't even get T-Mobile coverage in their own store! The employee was quite embarrassed.

That is real world user data collected by the app, not from T-Mobile.

[Going My Way]

I dumped Sprint/T-Mobile just 1 month ago and switched cell phone coverage to Verizon, I see no difference...

[donfey]

Agreed. And, with so many "Senior Plans" in TV, what would be the incentive for Verizon or AT&T to invest in any upgrade?

[superbat1]

Don't know how to quote. We do have many electric poles in the villages, street light poles.

[Kenswing]

I think the bandwidth in The Villages is pretty good. My sales agent was able to Facetime me from St. Catherine with no buffering. Maybe there's better speed closer to the turnpike?

[B-flat]

I will upgrade to the iPhone 12 ProMax and it's NOT because of 5g. I'm a photographer and the added tweaks to the hardware in the ProMax will make a nice addition to my line up of cameras/lenses. I had a choice I could spend another $1000 another lens ( not a bad idea either) or just get the ProMax, the best camera is the one you have with you and 3 out of 5 times it's the phone that's with me

[Altavia]

I think the bandwidth in The Villages is pretty good. My sales agent was able to Facetime me from St. Catherine with no buffering. Maybe there's better speed closer to the turnpike?

I'm line of sight to the the tower at the intersection of the turnpike and Warm Springs as many of the southern villages are and watching them install multiple new transmtters today on.

Thinking of getting a 5G hotspot and cutting the cable completely.

[EdFNJ]

Not sure how many of you remember when "3G" then 4G then 4GLTE started out. Most of the cell companies just rebranded their previous service as the "next generation" even before it was actually available. This is a very interesting article (ignore if desired the stuff about the iPhone) from INC magazine and skim down to where the different types of 5G are explained towards the end. It is doubtful you will see "true 5G" here in any of our lifetimes. I'll bet carriers will just jack up their download speeds and change the little indicator to read 5G which is exactly what happened with 3G, 4G and 4GLTE for the first couple years unless you were living in a major metro area.

The 5G iPhone Is Coming But It'''s Not What You Think | Inc.com (https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/the-5g-iphone-is-coming-but-its-not-what-you-think.html)

From the article: Low-band 5G is generally just a rebrand of some versions of the 4G LTE we've had for years. You won't notice anything different, except your phone will probably say 5G next to the signal indicator because, again, cellular companies have spent a lot of money convincing people they need 5G, so the phones better say that's what they're giving you.

That being said, I get Over 90Mbps download on cheap Total Wireless plan that costs me $55/mo for 2 lines with 30gig of data of which we barely use 10gig per month (a Verizon MVNO, like Xfinity and a few others).

[RoadToad]

I'm line of sight to the the tower at the intersection of the turnpike and Warm Springs as many of the southern villages are and watching them install multiple new transmtters today on.

Thinking of getting a 5G hotspot and cutting the cable completely.

Be very diligent before you do that. We did that here for a while before a cable provider was available.
A Data plan to accomodate adequate Streaming needs costs far more than an "Internet only" cable provider.
Comcast is currently the only option in our area.
Their $25 @ Mo "basic" "cable-only" plan is totally adequate for full time Tv streaming.
Both in Bandwidth and Data cap.

[Bearlythere]

Breaking news, for all you I phone addicts ,Apple does not have any devices that are 5g capable . Only Android devices have it and yes it is faster

[biker1]

Yes, you are correct today. However, the first 5G iphone12s will be available starting tomorrow (10/23). It may be 4-5 years before 5G becomes as ubiquitous as 4G, and in some areas it may be longer than that. For The Villages, it may eventually provide additional competition for home internet access.

Breaking news, for all you I phone addicts ,Apple does not have any devices that are 5g capable . Only Android devices have it and yes it is faster

[J1ceasar]

Really some people like my brother-in-law who buys my first toy like a VCR for $1,000. I waited a year and it was $99. 5G in theory is great but will probably take one to two years to cover Central Florida at least. Meanwhile Elon Musk is shooting up satellites every few weeks and we'll have five to ten thousand in the sky in one to two years at that time oh, you will see cable rates crash to $10 a month and you will truly have competition in the United States for Internet service and cable and tv. I predict Elon musk's next trick will be to have his own version of cell phones from the sky bye the year 2025 in the cell phones will become 99-cent items

[biker1]

Most of what you claim is unlikely and wrong. Specifically, the cost of the content is a big part of cable TV costs and that isn’t coming down. If you are content with only the network affiliates then the cost of TV is $0 with an antenna. The cost of internet has remained nearly constant for the last 20 years at about $40 per month (when considering inflation, it has dropped). Expecting the cost to drop by 4x is unrealistic. More likely, the cost will stay about the same or drop slightly with more competition. Case and point, in many parts of The Villages you have 3 choices for internet and the price is still about $40 per month. A new provider, even with much lower costs, is likely to consider the competition in their pricing model. Cellphones are not going to cost 99 cents. In fact, the cost keeps increasing. VCRs did not drop from $1000 to $100 in a year. If took many years for the price to drop that much.

Really some people like my brother-in-law who buys my first toy like a VCR for $1,000. I waited a year and it was $99. 5G in theory is great but will probably take one to two years to cover Central Florida at least. Meanwhile Elon Musk is shooting up satellites every few weeks and we'll have five to ten thousand in the sky in one to two years at that time oh, you will see cable rates crash to $10 a month and you will truly have competition in the United States for Internet service and cable and tv. I predict Elon musk's next trick will be to have his own version of cell phones from the sky bye the year 2025 in the cell phones will become 99-cent items

[kanoa1kale2]

Breaking news, for all you I phone addicts ,Apple does not have any devices that are 5g capable . Only Android devices have it and yes it is faster

Incorrect, the iPhone 12's are all 5G compatible.

[mulligan]

Don't know how to quote. We do have many electric poles in the villages, street light poles.

Decorative poles owned by SECO. Even on the remote chance they would allow some kind of attachment, do you suppose they would charge a fortune ??

[MandoMan]

Really? T-Mobile is deploying 5G here now.

T-Mobile (inc. Sprint) 3G / 4G / 5G coverage in The Villages, United States - nPerf.com (https://www.nperf.com/en/map/US/4175179.The-Villages/85.T-Mobile-inc-Sprint/signal/)

Here is the T-Mobile map you link to. It shows that 5G is available only for about a half mile of highway 441. Whether or not that is the slow kind of 5G or the fast kind, I don’t know. (The 5G is PURPLE on the map.)

I would really like it to be available everywhere. I just wanted to warn people that it may never be available all over The Villages, and it certainly isn’t now, so don’t be swayed by the ads. It seems that 5G at its best is really fast, but it only has a range of about three hundred yards, and it doesn’t penetrate walls. Maybe it will be possible to put receivers on our walls or roofs and get it inside that way. I don’t know. It won’t work with satellites or cell towers. It works best in densely populated cities with lots of above ground utility poles. I suppose that the wiring for it would be pulled through conduits along the streets, just like the other wires at The Villages. Now there’s a source of income! Renting space for wiring. Would the occasional light pole be enough, as it is now? I don’t think so, but maybe more will be installed. Three hundred yards. Three football fields. I think we would need about three times as many poles as we have now. That could be done, perhaps. But I read that it doesn’t go around corners well. So we could have interesting situations where we have it in the front yard, but not in the back yard.

[Sunflower33]

I have 5g with spectrum. Have had it for almost 2 yesrs

[kendi]

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.

[Uphillputt330]

A non issue imo. Faster is not always better.

In addition to the two forms of 5G there is a 3rd form “mid-range” 5G.

The low form of 5G is not much better, I.e. faster, if at all, from 4G. This is what the carriers are currently showing for nationwide coverage. The carriers can distribute the low-form from existing cellular towers.

The high form mmWave P, with the very high speed that the carriers are showing in demonstrations. It has a very short radius (A city block or two) and cannot penetrate concrete block, etc. It probably will on be in urban areas and corporate campuses.p for the foreseeable future.

There is a third form, a mid-range, that has speeds of 100mb to 900mb, a real improvement over 4G. Its distribution radius from towers is only a quarter or third of 4G, but there is hope that repeaters, similar to WiFi repeaters, will be able to extend the coverage. Carriers are only beginning to distribute the mid-range but the mid-range is where I believe there is real hope, and opportunity, for the future particularly in the Villages. I think it is 2-to-4 years until the mid-range is prevalent.

[Mrprez]

I have 5g with spectrum. Have had it for almost 2 yesrs

5G WiFi? Or 5G cell phone signal? Two different things.

[EdFNJ]

Breaking news, for all you I phone addicts ,Apple does not have any devices that are 5g capable . Only Android devices have it and yes it is faster Your news is "broken." All iPhone 12's are 5G.

[Altavia]

Sharing a quick test on a iPhone 12 that verifies what the experts posted here. Test was line of sight to a cell tower along the turnpike.

[EdFNJ]

93ms latency (lag). That's pretty awful. Poor latency kinda defeats the faster speed. Did you run the test a few times, maybe it was a 1 time fluke? Latency should be around half that. Very surprised. BTW, T-Mo 5G is lowband 5G which is basically just LTE (4G) sped up by 20%. They haven't done any mid or hi band 5G other than in a few blocks in a few major cities.

I get 97Mbps down 20 up (4G LTE) on an old iPhone 7 (latency 48%, ping 20%) on a prepaid carrier Total Wireless, using Verizon towers from my L/R. We likely won't see "real" mid or hi band 5G here in any of our lifetimes. They can put whatever they want on the indicator. :) It's all for the advertising.

Waiting for the iPhone 12 PRO Max to come out. I had sold my 11 while prices were still up.

[Altavia]

93ms latency (lag). That's pretty awful. Poor latency kinda defeats the faster speed. Did you run the test a few times, maybe it was a 1 time fluke? Latency should be around half that. Very surprised. BTW, T-Mo 5G is lowband 5G which is basically just LTE (4G) sped up by 20%. They haven't done any mid or hi band 5G other than in a few blocks in a few major cities.

I get 97Mbps down 20 up (4G LTE) on an old iPhone 7 (latency 48%, ping 20%) on a prepaid carrier Total Wireless, using Verizon towers from my L/R. We likely won't see "real" mid or hi band 5G here in any of our lifetimes. They can put whatever they want on the indicator. :) It's all for the advertising.

Waiting for the iPhone 12 PRO Max to come out. I had sold my 11 while prices were still up.

It was a fluke, getting 53ms from my L/R, still not great...

I tend to upgrade while prices are up and for the better camera's.