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Personally what I find the most misleading is that map of the United States of America.
Aside from the other countries missing from North America, my question is when did Cuba get such great coverage from AT&T??!?
Would that be Puerto Rico perhaps? Nothing seems to be missing given that it's a map that shows US states/territories with coverage essentially.
 
In Hong Kong this may be a criminal offence claiming to have a service that you cannot or are not offering.

In many places, not only Hong Kong.

If you do this in the UK the FBI (Fish-and-Chips Bureau of Investigation) will be kicking down your door within 5 minutes for false advertising. Also you'll be sued to next Sunday and get a ****ing massive fine.

How the hell AT&T is getting away with this I don't know.
 
Could be I’m testing inside my house
Were you outside when you got that ?
I was inside our home as well. My only guess would be cell tower issue/congestion? You might be in a part of the city with more cell tower traffic?
 
I tested it four times.
Minimum was 29 down and 1.7 up
Maximum was 49 down and about 1 up
This is inside my single level home in a residential urban neighborhood.
iPhone Xs

Doesn't real 5G require millimeter waves that only go very short distances (and not through walls well, etc.)? I was under the impression it will be years before any of that is even deployed in tiny spot areas of certain cities. I think there would have to be a 5G unit across the street on the telephone pole for that to work.

Of course, we'll probably know when the deployment is wide-spread, as the cancer rates will rise in correlation. :(

Speedtest.net (which isn’t accurate) is showing ~85 down and ~15 up on 5Ge.
I have not been able to load speedof.me on ATTs network. Connection is terminated. Possibly blocking it.
Netflix fast is showing only 4.5 down which is getting throttled. I have unlimited and nowhere near their limit.

LOL, blocking speedof.me that would figure... so you can't find out the truth. :)
Yeah, you have to be really careful with those speed-test services and apps.

We (up until recently) had Telus (DLS) home internet service (in Canada) who were advertising 'fibre' and some pretty fast symmetrical speeds... which I never was able to achieve. I complained. They blamed it on our WiFi or building, etc. Then after the 'promotion' tried to jack the prices up, so we switched to Shaw (cable).

Shaw is much slower (though faster than Telus reality for us), but the speed is more consistent (which, ironically, is supposed to be the selling point of DSL). But, what was funny is that the installer pointed my browser at some speed test (I think promoted by Netflix, too) that showed these super-fast numbers. After he left, I tried speedof.me and got the real numbers (less than advertised, but workable).

If I speed test right now on Shaw's tool, the show almost 700 down, but speedof.me shows about 160. Heh. SpeedTest on my iPhone shows about 225 (via WiFi).
 
Wouldn't this make more sense if it were 4Ge isntead of 5Ge?
Of course it would. But if they wanted to be honest, they would advertise these capabilities as "LTE Advanced" or "LTE-A", since that is what the wireless industry actually calls them.

Yup, it is super surprising that Apple intentionally added this as a listed update in the 12.2 documentation. It really goes against the grain of their publicly outward facing customer advocacy stance.
It certainly seems that way. And this isn't the first time. As others have pointed out, AT&T also markets HSPA+ (a faster version of the 3G/UMTS protocol) as 4G, and iPhones report it as such (reporting real 4G as "LTE")

I suspect there is some hardball going on between the companies. AT&T was the first US carrier to sell iPhones, so there may be some language in their contract that obligates Apple to go along with this nonsense. AT&T may also be hinting things like "if you don't, we won't promote your new iPhones in our advertisements".

I see 5Ge and the speeds are the same if not less than LTE
That's because "5GE" is the same LTE network you had before the iOS update. You've got the same phone, with the same chips and the same network. If your phone was capable of LTE-A features before the upgrade, then it is still using them today. The only difference is, literally, the icon displayed on the screen.

Isn’t there like a standards body for this crap? It’s not like companies can just say their router uses WiFi 12 or their phone uses BlueTooth 9.1. AT&T is so dirty and misleading. I dropped them not long after when I got my iPhone 5 in 2012.
There is a standards body, but interestingly enough, I don't think 3GPP has trademarks for terms like "4G" and "5G" (although there is an official 5G logo, which I assume is a trademark).

3GPP standards come in the form of releases, each of which is a large bundle of standards documents. Within each release, some features are mandatory and some are optional. Within the industry (if you look at equipment sold to network operators and makers of wireless chips), they all talk about which releases their products conform to. For example, LTE is release 8 (with some enhancements in release 9). LTE-Advanced (what AT&T is calling "5GE") is release 10. The 5G "New Radio" specification starts in release 15, with "phase 2" specifications in the (not yet finished) release 16.

This all having been said, it's also important to note that even within standards bodies, "4G" has referred to all successors to 3G. In addition to LTE (which we're all using today), it also include Wi-Max (which Sprint used as their 4G solution for a year or two) and TD-LTE (which has only been used in China). Even today, there are three different "4G" technologies, in addition to six predecessor and proposed-but-abandoned technologies. (Source: Wikipedia)

Fortunately, it appears that "5G" standards are not going through the mess that 4G did, so that term should be a lot clearer, despite AT&T's marketing department trying to muddy the waters.

Doesn't real 5G require millimeter waves that only go very short distances (and not through walls well, etc.)? I was under the impression it will be years before any of that is even deployed in tiny spot areas of certain cities. I think there would have to be a 5G unit across the street on the telephone pole for that to work.
Not quite. While millimeter wave is a key component of 5G, there are quite a lot of 5G technologies that also work at "sub 6" (that is less than 6 GHz) frequencies. This is actually of critical importance because, as you said, millimeter wave doesn't travel long distances, nor does it penetrate buildings very well, so any mobile 5G deployment is going to include both millimeter wave and sub-6 radio towers. 5G phones will almost certainly have at least two radio receivers, so they can connect to both at the same time - using sub-6 for "control plane" traffic (for maintaining connections) and to provide greater range, while using millimeter wave (which will hand-off to different cells far more rapidly and occasionally drop out altogether) for high-bandwidth data transfer.

There are deployments today, but not globally. Technology developers completed their field trials last year. Operators have small deployments right now and will be greatly expanding them in the next 2-3 years.

And yes, the millimeter wave part of the network is going to require a lot of antennas (and fiber or wireless connectivity to connect all of them up to the network) in order to provide good coverage. If you follow wireless industry news, you will see manufacturers negotiating with cities to place nodes behind public sign boards, in city furniture, underneath manhole covers, and anywhere else they can. Much like how, 30 years ago, the phone companies had pay phones on every block.

Of course, we'll probably know when the deployment is wide-spread, as the cancer rates will rise in correlation. :(
Millimeter wave does not penetrate the human body, so cancer risk is likely to be lower than sub-6 frequencies, which do.

BTW, that's why millimeter wave is one of the popular technologies for airport scanners - it scans the surface of your body instead of the inside (like an X-ray scanner would), which is what you want if you're looking for objects hidden in clothing.
 
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1E947F8D-057C-4DF1-80E3-3B72A943F10C.png
5Ge downstream is rockin tho
 
Not quite. While millimeter wave is a key component of 5G, there are quite a lot of 5G technologies that also work at "sub 6" (that is less than 6 GHz) frequencies. This is actually of critical importance because, as you said, millimeter wave doesn't travel long distances, nor does it penetrate buildings very well, so any mobile 5G deployment is going to include both millimeter wave and sub-6 radio towers. 5G phones will almost certainly have at least two radio receivers, so they can connect to both at the same time - using sub-6 for "control plane" traffic (for maintaining connections) and to provide greater range, while using millimeter wave (which will hand-off to different cells far more rapidly and occasionally drop out altogether) for high-bandwidth data transfer.
...
And yes, the millimeter wave part of the network is going to require a lot of antennas (and fiber or wireless connectivity to connect all of them up to the network) in order to provide good coverage. If you follow wireless industry news, you will see manufacturers negotiating with cities to place nodes behind public sign boards, in city furniture, underneath manhole covers, and anywhere else they can. Much like how, 30 years ago, the phone companies had pay phones on every block.

Ahh, I wasn't realizing the dual-use nature (ie: sub-6 and millimeter with fall-back). Thanks for that excellent explanation!

How does that impact speed, though? If you can't get the millimeter signal, but only the sub-6, what speeds do you get? Ping? etc. I thought the millimeter stuff was the key, but I'm just learning about this stuff a bit. :)

Millimeter wave does not penetrate the human body, so cancer risk is likely to be lower than sub-6 frequencies, which do.

BTW, that's why millimeter wave is one of the popular technologies for airport scanners - it scans the surface of your body instead of the inside (like an X-ray scanner would), which is what you want if you're looking for objects hidden in clothing.

Good points, I suppose unless the transmitter were in your ear-bud or something like that. I guess it is mostly a matter of strength/distance. I'm just concerned, as we're finding - it seems - that it isn't just about direct cellular destruction (as the testing is trying to measure), but potential disruption of cellular (body cells that is) communication or things more on that level.

I'm worried that this might be the smoking of this generation, where everyone thinks it is safe, and then we discover a bunch of impacts from having devices in our pockets and BT earbuds and all that kind of stuff on for long periods of time. And, it might not even be cancer, but some other impact. I just can't see how it wouldn't have some impact... I just don't know how negative the impact might be.
 
Ahh, I wasn't realizing the dual-use nature (ie: sub-6 and millimeter with fall-back). Thanks for that excellent explanation!

How does that impact speed, though? If you can't get the millimeter signal, but only the sub-6, what speeds do you get? Ping? etc. I thought the millimeter stuff was the key, but I'm just learning about this stuff a bit. :)
Wireless technology is incredibly complicated. Even at a high-level "hand waving" description, there's a lot to keep track of.

Regarding bandwidth in the sub-6 spectrum, that really depends on the bandwidth of the radio carriers. A standard 20MHz LTE carrier can support a certain bandwidth (actual numbers depend greatly on the signal strength, signal quality and the number of users simultaneously transmitting or receiving on that carrier. And the numbers vary constantly on a per-user basis as users move about and interference conditions change).

Moving from LTE to LTE-A or to 5G can pack more data on that 20 MHz carrier because there are denser bit-encoding algorithms (if conditions permit), better error detection/correction algorithms, and several other low-level features in the NR ("New Radio") specification. Additionally, an operator may choose to use wider-bandwidth carriers (up to 100MHz for LTE-A and I think up to 640 MHz for 5G), if there is available spectrum to do so.

The primary reason why mmWave offers more bandwidth is because that space is pretty much unused today, and there are very wide gaps between the standard bands - so there's plenty of room to create high-bandwidth carriers, whereas that isn't likely to be possible in many sub-6 bands, where each band is pretty narrow and can't be changed without a lot of changes by federal regulators.

For example, an operator might choose to to reuse the old 850 MHz GSM band for 5G. But that band's frequencies are 824.2-848.8 MHz uplink (user-to-tower) and 869.2-893.8 MHz downlink (tower-to-user) - only 24.6 MHz bandwidth in each direction, meaning there really is no room for a carrier wider than the 20 MHz used by LTE today. An operator reusing the 1900 MHz PCS band (1850.2-1909.8 MHz uplink, 1930.2-1989.8 MHz downlink) would have 59.6 MHz in each direction available in the band and could therefore create a wider-bandwidth carrier, but there's still nowhere near enough bandwidth for, say, a 100MHz carrier.

Dual-connectivity (where your phone connects to two different cells at once - like a sub-6 and a mmWave) is one of the ways around this problem. You might send your voice traffic and SMS texts over sub-6, where there should be plenty of bandwidth for those applications, but give preference to mmWave for data-heavy applications like streaming video, assuming that application buffering can be enough to deal with the less reliable radio signal.

Here are some of the features of LTE-A and 5G, many of which don't get a lot of press.

  • Carrier Aggregation - one user may connect to multiple carriers at once to increase available bandwidth.
  • Dual Connectivity - Connect to two different towers at once. Could be to increase bandwidth. Could be to support sub-6 and mmWave at once. Can also be used as a 4G-5G transition mechanism to allow 5G nodes to relay data through a 4G central office and vice versa.
  • MIMO and/or beam-forming - Uses many antennas to increase throughput (as is the case with Wi-Fi). Also allows cell sites to support more simultaneous users and to extend the usable distance from the antenna. In LTE, MIMO is typically 2x2, 4x4 or 8x8 (2, 4 or 8 antenna elements per cell). In 5G, massive MIMO (supporting up to 128 elements) can be supported. There's also R&D going on for future support of "beam steering", where beamforming is used to focus each user's slice of the carrier on his specific location (much like how MU-MIMO does on a much smaller scale for Wi-Fi).
  • Network slicing - "slicing" a radio carrier into many sub-carriers that have different QoS (bandwidth and latency) requirements. Reserve some for high priority applications (like emergency services) that can kick-out lower-priority traffic when needed.
  • LAA - License-Assisted Access. Allowing mobile devices to use unlicensed spectrum (e.g. the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz used by Wi-Fi), when nobody else is trying to use it at the same time. If done right, this can increase available mobile bandwidth. If done wrong, it can degrade performance of unlicensed devices like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cordless phones, etc., making this a somewhat controversial piece of tech.

If it's starting to seem like it requires a full-time job to keep up with all this, I would tend to agree with you. The more I read about modern wireless telephony, the more amazed I am that the system works at all.
 
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what makes speedof.me any more "real" than speedtest.net?

speedtests.jpg


Because of stuff like this...
(same computer via ethernet connection to the router, moments apart)

You can read a bit more about it on the 'about' and 'how it works' links at the bottom of speed of me site, but also on this article:
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-find-a-reliable-network-speed-test/

ex: "Many experts claim HTML5-based speed tests are more accurate than tests that use Java and Adobe Flash. Others point out that multithread tests such as those used by Ookla (Speedtest.net and branded by many ISPs) don't represent real-world network traffic as well as single-thread tests."

Also, it seems the Ookla products are the ones being sold to the various ISPs to rebrand as their tests. When the Shaw rep hooked up my connect, the speed test tool was showing around 700+ Mbps down, compared to the 150-250 I typically get. Something fishy is going on there, and I'm assuming it is a combo of multi-threading, the test server is probably on the network, etc.

Over the years since I discovered it, I've found Speed of Me to be much more consistent and hopefully accurate. That doesn't mean it is the only one, or even possibly the best in certain circumstances... but I've found it to be pretty good.
 
View attachment 829713

Because of stuff like this...
(same computer via ethernet connection to the router, moments apart)

You can read a bit more about it on the 'about' and 'how it works' links at the bottom of speed of me site, but also on this article:
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-find-a-reliable-network-speed-test/

ex: "Many experts claim HTML5-based speed tests are more accurate than tests that use Java and Adobe Flash. Others point out that multithread tests such as those used by Ookla (Speedtest.net and branded by many ISPs) don't represent real-world network traffic as well as single-thread tests."

Also, it seems the Ookla products are the ones being sold to the various ISPs to rebrand as their tests. When the Shaw rep hooked up my connect, the speed test tool was showing around 700+ Mbps down, compared to the 150-250 I typically get. Something fishy is going on there, and I'm assuming it is a combo of multi-threading, the test server is probably on the network, etc.

Over the years since I discovered it, I've found Speed of Me to be much more consistent and hopefully accurate. That doesn't mean it is the only one, or even possibly the best in certain circumstances... but I've found it to be pretty good.
Speedtest gives you the option of doing a single-threaded test if you prefer.
 
View attachment 828427


I tested it four times.

Minimum was 29 down and 1.7 up
Maximum was 49 down and about 1 up

This is inside my single level home in a residential urban neighborhood.

iPhone Xs

I tested mine and got 70.10 mbs down on my i phone x and on lte i only get between 25 to 30 mbs. Yeah the name is crazy but if your getting faster speeds why all the hate
 
I tested mine and got 70.10 mbs down on my i phone x and on lte i only get between 25 to 30 mbs. Yeah the name is crazy but if your getting faster speeds why all the hate

Because it's NOT 5G, it's LTE but they call it 5Ge - why not call it LTEe ??

It borders on false advertising, but adding the little "e" at the end makes it okay.
 
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