https://www.techradar.com/news/the-first-5g-phone-hands-on
The first 5G phone: our hands-on with the future of smartphones
by Mark Knapp (Tech Radar)
Verizon's activation of its 5G network is far from a wide launch. Officially, the network is only live in Chicago, Illinois, and in Minneapolis, Minnesota. While Chicago is a sizable city, and Minneapolis isn't small, the actual availability of 5G in each city is still limited.
For now, only a handful of Chicago wards are covered in the 5G network, and Verizon hasn't released any coverage map for customers to see.
These are dense areas of Chicago, including Magnificent Mile (specifically the Verizon store), Gold Coast, Old Town, River North, and portions of South Loop and West Loop. Milwaukee's 5G coverage areas are in Downtown West, Downtown East, Elliot Park, and the Mall of America's Verizon Store.
Aside from the hands-on in the Magnificent Mile Verizon Store where the launch event took place, we knew getting to experience 5G in the wild might take a bit of work.
5G vs 4G LTE speeds
In the Verizon Store where the launch event took place, there was a 5G node set up at the front. And, with a short distance between the Moto Z3 and the node, with line of sight, the device managed to hit 651Mbps downstream. Compare that to a later test on the 4G network that hit 213Mbps downstream. Meanwhile, upstream data actually only uses 4G, so there's no speed boost for that.
How does that speed translate into real-world performance?
All the 1080p videos on YouTube started playing promptly as we flicked through one after another. Scrubbing through each video's runtime caused a momentary pause before playback resumed. However, after switching over to 4G, we didn't see much of a difference while doing the same thing.
Since most of us don't use our mobile network just to run speed tests, we jumped right onto the Play Store to download the hefty 1.81GB PUBG Mobile game. On the 5G network, the download took just shy of 4 minutes and 30 seconds. Repeating the download on the 4G network, the download took 6 minutes and 8 seconds.
So, while the 5G network is clearly the faster of the two, it's not by an order of magnitude.
5G reliability
Over the course of our initial hands-on, we seriously questioned Verizon's 5G network's reliability.
Take the Verizon Store where the event took place: it was scarcely bigger than 30 feet across and 100 feet back, with a 5G node in the front of the building. Reception was spotty toward the back, and could even peter out near the front. We noticed the Moto Z3 switch from 5G to 4G LTE on multiple occasions as we moved around, and had to keep checking that our speed tests were 5G all the way through.
While we'll be testing the 5G connectivity over the next week throughout the Chicago area, we'll be checking whether the millimeter wave technology Verizon uses for its 5G network will be able to penetrate obstacles and walls. The lack of a defined 5G map is also an issue, as any time we don't get 5G, we'll be left wondering whether it's because there's no signal in the area or if the phone is just fails to pick it up.
Our live 5G testing
4/5, 1:30 pm CT: Checking to make sure Netflix and the Play Store weren't a speed bottleneck, we connected to Wi-Fi and retried the downloads. The movie downloaded at close to 20MB/s and the game downloaded at about 13MB/s, vastly exceeding what we could get on our 5G connection.
4/5, 12:59 pm CT: Took another 5G field trip, and found a consistent signal at the base of a building that seemed like it would have actually blocked signal. A few speed tests that exceeded 400Mbps confirmed we had a real 5G connection, though a test using a single data stream showed only 17.3Mbps downstream. In between multiple tests that showed high speeds, we attempted to download another movie on Netflix and a game on the Play Store, but neither managed to download much faster than 1MB/s, whereas a 400Mbps connection should offer up to 50MB/s download speeds.
4/5, 9:10 am CT: Further into West Loop, found a semi-stable 5G signal and ran a series of speed tests, getting 292Mbps, 113Mbps, 65.5Mbps, and 240Mbps. The speed tests didn't show a correlation between 5G signal strength and speeds.
4/5, 8:58 am CT: Walked into the West Loop on a street that has frequent wide views of The Loop. Once again, experienced 4G and 5G quickly switching back and forth. Ran a speed test while the network was toggling and got 47.4Mbps downstream.
4/4, 5:25 pm CT: Left the West Loop after a day generally spent without 5G. The millimeter wave technology used is fairly dependent on line of sight, and that can be hard to find, but we'll keep trying.
4/4, 12:30 pm CT: Popping back outside into the rain to see how long it'd take to download The Raid Redemption at 446MB on the 5G network, we gave up after 2 minutes and 30 seconds that had only netted 44MB. A quick speed test showed the lowest speeds we'd seen all day at 59.9Mbps. Never mind downloading a whole TV show season before a flight takes off, we couldn't even download Iko Uwais kicking his first a--.
4/4, 12:08 pm CT: Went into the grocery store on that same corner and couldn't get 5G even sitting next to a window near that corner.
4/4, 11:56 am CT: Took the Moto Z3 out for a walk in the West Loop, because the 5G signal couldn't bother to join me indoors on this cold and rainy day. Found a corner closer to The Loop that had 5G signal, though it was still spotty. Ran a speed test that hit 448Mbps downstream with a 19ms ping time.
This isn't even close to "ready to go". Line of sight will be an ongoing nightmare, if they can't even "fire up" one Verizon store with one node.