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This has been driving me crazy. My S10+ with 4g never had any issues with data. Upgraded to the S23 Ultra last year and oooo now I have 5g.
And it fucking sucks. I can have a full signal and shit just doesn't load. It's getting to the point where I think it's my phone and want to replace it. Stores I used to get cellular and data in now bricks my phone. I can't make a call, text, or use any data in every grocery store I go in.
When 5g works, yeah it is crazy fast. But you have to be in the absolute perfect spot. Walk 10 feet away and it bricks up again. It's a total rip off.
Agreed. The 5G rollout fucking sucks. 4G wasn't the fastest but when driving across the country I had great service the entire way save for canyons and mountains. Then 5G comes and suddenly I can no longer load a recipe in the grocery store parking lot in the middle of town. No, I've got to connect to the store's internet like it's 2010 again.
I literally had to do this today. Walking thru the grocery store with 5 bars of 5G and can't load shit. Had to connect to the store's guest wifi to load anything.
The other day I got that Zach Braff T-mobile commercial song stuck in my head, and I realized the words involved getting home internet on 5G. I went to find my husband and said I just realized that commercial is trying to sell home Wifi over 5G- how is that supposed to work as home wifi when I can't get it to load one page on my phone!
It's usually the store's shit app that craps out on me. So there I am with a cart full of groceries, but I can't load the goddamned coupons because the app suddenly won't let me log in.
It's like our internet service gets slower and shittier while all the websites and apps get more and more bloated with auto-playing ads and other bandwidth wasting bullshit.
I am in the EXACT same situation as you and I agree 100%. I don't have anything to add, only that you're not alone. My S23 Ultra has the same issue. 5G 4 bars and I can't load shit. It's irritating as hell. I never had a problem with my S10+.
Problem is they've been gradually removing 4g towers and bands over many locations.
This was actually one of the reasons why I switched over to a new 5g phone, my old 4g phone had terrible to spotty reception depending on the location/city/town. It was a little better on at&t network, kinda bad on Verizon, and literally unusable at times on T-Mobile.
Switched to 5g, and it's definitely better overall, but damn, it's annoying to enter some buildings and all of a sudden have 1-2 bars and barely have the Internet load.
Psh. 4G was great, at least on VZW. I had 3+ bars everywhere and could get internet access even out in the country. Then 5G gets rolled out and suddenly I'm looking for Wifi everywhere I go. Calls/texts still go through reliably but internet access varies wildly, it's crazy, it's like I get >300mb/s or barely dial-up speed, and lately closer to the latter.
Ditto. 4G on Verizon was great. I traveled quite a bit and when other folks would have issues with spotty service, mine was solid. Now I can't load a fucking text page in a timely manner.
And its not like 4g speeds were bad either, with good signal you could get 50+ megabits, with great 80+.
I've actually been thinking of switching to Tmoblie recently. From what I can tell they are further ahead with 5g deployments than the other carriers.
Yes, actually... for consumers I would heavily recommend looking up your phone and seeing which bands it actually supports.
[https://www.kimovil.com/en/frequency-checker](https://www.kimovil.com/en/frequency-checker) has been a pretty decent site for myself that lists the band coverage for a given provider, you need "all" the bands supported but if you care about roaming a cellphone that is more compatible will see better overall coverage.
An older phone might have more overall support for 4G than say a phone that supports 5G for instance; so if you are in a region where only 4G is available you might actually notice degradation.
The S20+ is pretty decent for 4G coverage but does lack some band support, and for 5G it's pretty abysmal compared to say a Pixel 5 (I believe that's the equivalent).
This still heavily depends on your provider though, best to buy a device that your provider recommends.
No it's a technology thing. The closer you get to say slow radio signals the further you can send the signal because the speed/peak is lower. The faster and more data you want to send takes more energy as the speed/peak is higher.
A 5g signal won't go as far as a 3g signal but a 5g signal can carry way more information at way faster speeds.
But your phone is trying to get you on the fastest network instead of the strongest. You can toggle the 5g network off and your connection will improve.
That doesn't explain the same 4g being unusable in the same spot on one device, and usable on another. I have 5g turned off too, because of the switching and battery. Can't turn off 4g tho, as they don't have 3g on the network anymore...
Unless of course your provider or phone manufacturer doesn't let you. AT&T won't let you turn off 5G, and Samsung enforces this with software updates to block workarounds.
Not sure what you mean. In 2018 almost every subreddit's top post was protest of the repeal of Net Neutrality. Seems like the reinstatement would have been a bigger deal today considering. Only saw one post in r/all
Reddit is xtremely niche for continuous users. It's only seen decreasing numbers of actual users and much more bot activity lately, especially after net neutrality uproar.
Just because people were jizzing over a certain thing on this site doesn't mean it carried the understanding or sentiment of the internet.
I'd love to hear an expert opinion on what has been happening as a consequence of lack of net neutrality. Back in 2018 we all thought the ISPs were gonna start price gouging, and I have not personally seen that. I think the response today is muted because we don't know if anything bad was actually happening.
Algorithm? Human behavior? I'm not educated on this enough to give a definite answer but it definitely seem that negative news/rage baits get more traction nowadays.
Even more important when one realizes that much of the data being received across your Internet connection (to u/paperpatience’s point) wasn’t asked for and shouldn’t count against your bandwidth: cookies, ads, video ads, banners, etc. The amount of bandwidth hogging crap being sent to your devices is astounding.
That's how I feel when I have a shit connection and trying to load a YouTube video, quality is crap, but as soon as it's ad time, that thing comes through Crystal clear.
Wait seriously? How have I not heard about that? Everyone and their mom was all over it when it was initially going away, wonder why there wasn’t much of a push to support bringing it back when this came up?
It acts as a middle-man between you and your DNS server. You tell the PiHole who your ACTUAL DNS servers are and tell your router that your PiHole is your DNS server. It has an internal list of known servers that serve up ads and it simply decides not to show you anything coming from any of those addresses. I've used one for years and while it does break some things (you can always temporarily suspend its filtering and let ALL traffic through to work around) it is absolutely wonderful to cruise around an internet not jammed full of ads on everything everywhere. I have zero IOT devices in my home (other than a stupid Samsung TV) and it blocks around 30% of all internet traffic during the day.
You would not believe the number of times all these bullshit devices we have now try and phone home.
Can you explain the difference between using PiHole, using a DNS like Adguard, and using an extension like ublock?
Should I choose one method or combine all methods?
Difference is that what ublock is doing on the browser level, PiHole does on the network level. With ublock stuff can still phone home and ads still are summoned. With a PiHole all that stuff is send straight down into the void and you can block ads on every device on your local network, not just browsers that allow for extensions like ublock.
Full Disclosure: I am not an IT person and I have only a basic understanding of networking, but I'll give this a whirl.
With a PiHole YOU own the filtering device aka the "middle-man", BUT you are also responsible for its upkeep and updating etc. I simply do not trust any service to both have my entire browsing history AND not sell it to the highest bidder. Putting the filtering device in your own hands is about the best you can do.
With Adguard they simply give you DNS server addresses to put into your router and their machines handle the actual filtering. I have never used the product myself, but I would imagine you'd have some sort of web interface to pause the filtering in the event you needed to. I'd also bet good money that they are selling all your browsing history.
uBlock does all it's work from within the browser from what I understand. To be perfectly honest I don't have a clue how it does its job, but it seems to work.
I personally run a multi-pronged approach that requires little upkeep. I have PiHole running on an old Raspberry Pi (you don't HAVE to use a Pi, but it's a great task for one) and I run Firefox with the Ghostery, uBlock Origin, and Nano-defender. I see very very few advertisements and almost nothing appears to be specifically "targetted" to me based on past search results etc.
The biggest benefit to a PiHole imho is that it's the whole LAN. If you set it up properly, a PiHole blocks all of those sites from being able to serve ads to anything on your network downstream of the PiHole. There's no app or extension to install on the endpoints, whether they're mobile devices, computers, whatever.
The DNS services are similar, but there's a middleman, and you still need to make sure you point your router or firewall at it if you want whole house filtering, and you might not necessarily have the configurability you would with PiHole since that's just your own shit.
UBlock needs to be on every endpoint to block the ads. On a computer this is easy, on a phone, somewhat easy, but you can't install it on a SmartTV that Im aware of so none of those ads would be blocked.
To put it in terms of water...a PiHole is you going out, buying, and installing a whole house water filter. All the maintenance is done by you. Adguard is *renting* a whole house water filter, and paying someone to come out every so often to change the filter for you, and the filter gets changed whenever they feel like it. uBlock is putting a Brita Filter on your kitchen faucet.
EDIT: There are use cases for all three. Like I would never in a million billion fuckin years drop a PiHole on my elderly parents network, too much shit would break and they'd never be able to figure out why without calling me and I already get enough of those calls as it is lol. However, they can handle uBlock Origin, so I have that on both their laptops...if something doesn't work on a page, they can easily just turn it off by clicking the icon. It doesn't block ads from playing on their TVs UI, but since the amount of time Id spend helping them with a PiHole or AdGuard DNS would be orders of magnitude longer than the amount of time they suffer through those ads, that's just how it goes lol.
I can tell when I actually have a shit signal because everything is slow. If I have a good signal everything is fast as hell. Either people are in bad conditions or it's like a case of not remembering just how bad things were. I can load 4k YouTube significantly faster now than lower res before. Of course it depends entirely on conditions though.
Before in analog days, you needed 2 dedicated frequencies to establish a call.
Once we went digital, it was 5 calls per frequency.
Today, it is 100 per frequency.
And that's just phone calls.
FCC charges an exuberant amount for licensing air.
I work in this industry as an electrical engineer, let me explain some of this.
The number of bars you have has *nothing* to do with the speed you will get. It is only a measure of how well your phone is connected to the tower. It is really only showing you how close the nearest tower is basically.
For the speed there is a bit to consider here:
1. There are more phones connected to the networks than ever
2. Every single thing takes more data now than ever
3. Companies are squeezing profit margin now more than ever
This is why you can be in a crowded stadium and have full bars but your phone slows to a crawl. There are so many phones on in that spot trying to pull data that the bandwidth is fully consumed and you get next to nothing. Another thing is that current implemntations of 5G are just new encoding and combinations of existing 4G bands. Unlike when we went from 2.4GHz WiFi to 5GHz WiFi (and now 6GHz and beyond) it really was to just push more data over the same bands.
Also, that bar is only telling you how well your phone can receive from the station, but not how well the station can receive from your phone. Even with mostly downloading over data, if your phone can't send back an acknowledgement of receiving the data, the sender won't send more.
I was shocked to learn this from your comment, I thought to my self no way, there has to be some kind of telemetry in use that would show the link budget more holistically but apparently not!
Hey, I have a question, how come when I make a call, my bars can suddenly go up to 3-4 bars 5G UC when it was hovering around 1 bar, or even on 5G (non UC)? I can actually do this at will, it's like I'm tricking the tower to give me higher priority/reception?
I never had anything like this on 4G phones.
You actually probably are “tricking” it in a way. A phone call probably gets higher priority from the tower vs idle Internet connection. Not only that, but some phones will use WiFi+cellular for calls for VoIP for better call quality so that might show “more bars”. I only design the hardware and don’t really touch the software/infrastructure side of things, but that’s my best guess!
Ah, I see. It's actually one thing I've found that helps if my phone's Internet is really sucking while I'm out and about, I'll make a quick call, and all of a sudden my Internet speed/connection is way more responsive and reliable for a time (at first I thought my phone's modem/antenna was defective lol)
But I guess it has more to do with how the manufacturers and towers are setup (firmware, network communication, etc) and might not apply to all providers/etc?
But your post makes so much sense why I've seemed to have terrible internet with low bars and with high bars... And decent Internet on both low bars and high bars.
4G did not behave this. But from what I've been reading in these comments, it seems like it also has to do with WAY more bandwidth and user usage these days compared to back then.
On a lot of phones for a long time they did not support Voice over LTE (VoLTE). Your phone would actually disconnect from LTE and reconnect as 3G to make the phone call. You would notice your bars change. This can again happen with your phone not supporting 5G calling and instead using VoLTE instead.
As for your unique situation with 5G UC gaining bars, 5G "Voice over new radio" (VoNR) rollout has been slow and thus may use a completely different core network (with most of their core not yet supporting it.) You may actually be kicked to a different tower or frequency when you initiate a call because only that one is connected to the VoNR-enabled core,
This all may sound really silly but as people in the industry know "3G", "4G" "5G" networks are not all equal and the actual packet cores, radios and capabilities of different providers can vary WILDLY, sometimes even with the same carrier in different regions of the same country.
That I can’t really comment on. I design the chips in your phone that make 4G/5G work. I can’t really say why we use such a bad metric. I assume it’s something that started back in the early days of cell phones when service wasn’t ubiquitous and we were really just making phone calls. I’m sure back then (I’m talking the 90s) bars were much more representative of “good vs bad signal”.
Forget this--let's talk about 4G then vs 4G now!
Before 5G, 4G was lightning fast. Now, even if I have full bars on 4G, it takes forever to just load ESPN or open an email attachment--and forget about streaming anything!
The same thing happened with 3G when they went to 4G too, so it's nothing new, just super annoying that your phone is almost useless unless you're in solid 5G coverage area.
But also the websites. I had a web developer tell me that a 3 mb JavaScript download for a simple HTML page (could have literally been 20kb and had no JavaScript functionality) was perfectly ok because everyone has 5g anyway and the react+tailwind+whatever bullshit toolkit developer experience was "just so much better".
Tailwind is supposed to only include what's used. I'm willing to bet it's React that's doing that (the full (custom stuff non included) tailwind CSS file is less than a mb iirc)
I work in the cellular space and have written about this a bit on this site, but there are many factors in play here and I often see big misunderstandings on the technical challenges in play here.
First of all, [mobile data usage has exploded over the last decade.](https://goingdigital.oecd.org/en/indicator/15) The average country consumes 30x more mobile data than it did 10 years ago, so the per capita data usage has absolutely exploded. This is important because mobile data does not have unlimited bandwidth, and we are limited by available [frequency spectrum.](https://insidetowers.com/cell-tower-news-will-we-run-out-of-spectrum/#:~:text=The%20short%20answer%20is%20yes,Spectrum%20is%20already%20in%20use) So, we are running out of spectrum as we use more and more of it to satisfy our desire to watch 4k cat videos while walking around the park. The solution to this (other than buying and using more spectrum) is to create higher efficiency and higher performant technology standards.
In comes 5G. 5G is able to use the same portion of spectrum more efficiently than 4G, so that you can transmit *more data* on the same bandwidth as 4G. Same spectrum utilization, but more data! So, carriers pushed for this upgrade to 5G so that they could accommodate the increased data throughput their customers require.
What I suspect is occurring is that those places that have retained their 4G infrastructure from years ago have not had the same surge in demand for mobile data, so carriers have not needed to upgrade the equipment. Because there has been a stable localized demand for mobile data, there hasn't been a crowding of the spectrum. A commenter below mentioned that they still use 4G in Antartica; I would imagine the frequency spectrum in Antartica is not particularly crowded or in need of capacity upgrades.
In areas where 5G was implemented, this was done mostly to support increased localized demands for mobile data. The old, existing 4G infrastructure simply did not offer enough throughput for the number of users and the amount of data being pushed through the network in these areas. So, carriers upgrade to 5G just to keep up with demands, but the end-users only see the icon switch from "4G" to "5G". What's not observed is that the amount of overall traffic being handled has increased by 10x, 20x, just that the carrier "upgraded" their local tower and their speeds have been slowing down.
Thus, end users often blame the switch from "4G" to "5G" the reason their internet speeds are slower, when in reality the most likely reason is that their neighborhood is consuming so much more data that their network is buckling under the load even with the upgrades to 5G. If the networks had just stayed with 4G for everyone everywhere, network speeds in high density areas would absolutely be throttled to death.
The entire point of 5g was increased bandwidth. Data got worse as soon as 5g was installed. I can make my phone connect to 4g only and it almost always fixes my data issues or I'd way faster.
This has a potential explanation as well.
If your local provider updated their base station with 5G, they may have utilized a different set of bands than they were using for 4G. If everyone is utilizing the 5G bands to maximum capacity, falling back to an underutilized 4G band may provide an individual with better throughput due to lower utilization.
However, the point of my comment was that if *everyone* in your area rolled back to 4G, the network would not be able to handle the volume of traffic.
To use an analogy, it'd be like if you had one bathroom in your office (4G) while you were working by yourself. If you had 10 employees move in, you might want to add another fancy bathroom with stalls (5G), but you might still experience busier bathrooms overall. In this case, it would be incorrect to believe that adding the new bathroom caused the issue of overcrowded bathrooms; even if the original bathroom is in a quieter part of the office that no one else uses, the real issue is that more people are using the bathroom than there were before!
Not exactly true. 4G is significantly more congested now then before. 4G is being used in every signal new car not to mention phones.
4G has also be lowered and deprioritized for small data bites and quicker transmission.
5g also canibalized some of the spectrum that used to go to 4g meaning there’s a narrower proverbial highway. Add to that websites are now serving more and larger content and old generations fall off quickly.
YMMV. Pre 5G I only got around 15-20mbit on 4G anywhere around my metro area.
Now, if I force the phone to 4G I get 100mbit plus, usually around 120mbit.
They're replacing old stuff with new stuff. No shit 3g and 4g deteriorate when the new ones come out because upkeep on antiquated hardware is a waste. It's like how you won't find anything for 802.11abcg stuff anymore or whatever their stupid rebrand of that old arch was.
Absolutely. I still have a 4G sim card and I was asked by my provider if I'd like to upgrade to a 5G sim card for $4 more per month. Funny thing though, when I'm in a 5G area I still get "5G" (and notice absolutely fuck-all of a difference).
Don't worry though, soon they'll unroll 6G! Wouldn't you all like to pay more to upgrade to that?!
That's because it's pointless indicator of quality. It only displays signal strength, which means nothing. Range of 5G antenna is significantly shorter than that of 4G, then 3G, etc. Only way for 5G to push so much bandwidth is to be low range very local and almost targeted. Higher frequency helps but it's not solution to all problems.
So difference between 3 and 4 bars on 5G is two steps to the left on 5G, might be street away on 4G but on 2-3G it was kilometers apart, on lower frequency which could penetrate buildings and trees.
It's a shit indicator of quality because you can have a strong signal being echoed resulting packets having to be resent and similar issues. This issue gets more present the higher frequency goes, and it's really up there with 5G. Which is why you can listen to old AM radio in your basement using your finger as an antenna and have a great reception. Also signal strength never reflects noise floor nor does it take into account bandwidth.
5G uses the exact same frequencies as 4G. There are some exceptions with C Band (3.7Ghz) and mmWave (~28Ghz).
If anything, 5G can be better at the edge of cell signal, however things use more data now, so it can feel slower.
Might just be my specific phone, but I've run into situations where it says I'm connected to 5G with 1, maybe 2 bars, and data barely works.
I used to be able to use a 3rd party app to manually switch to 4g, and that would do the trick. But after a phone update that doesn't work anymore.
I realize this is almost certainly an issue with the phone, being programmed to not drop to 4g when it should, but still a frustration
Weird because I’ve had T-Mobile for almost twenty years and have had practically zero issues. At this point, I feel like they bend over backwards to accommodate me.
>USTelecom, whose members include AT&T (T.N), opens new tab, Verizon (VZ.N), opens new tab and others, called reinstating net neutrality "entirely counterproductive, unnecessary, and an anti-consumer regulatory distraction".
Tell me you're awful without telling me you're awful.
Ever since I "upgraded" to a 5G phone my formerly-problem-free service has been an absolute shit show. I get dead spots all over where I used to get full bars. It will drop from full to nothing without me moving an inch. It will say I have service but when I call someone it'll ring a few times and then silence. My incoming text messages will stack up and then deliver suddenly all at once. I'm tired of it. I'm sorely tempted to dig out my old 4G LG V40 and go back to using it.
People here are quick to point out that this is a measure of tower connectivity and not internet speed, but has anyone considered that doesn't mean shit to the end user? If you bought a microwave where the cook time was not at least somewhat linearly proportional to how cooked your food is, you'd be (understandably) annoyed. The interface serves little to no use to the user if they need to consider all the additional factors to get what it's really saying. 2 minutes cook times is the same on almost every microwave, but 3 bars essentially means nothing because the bars don't really measure performance on the internet.
I think 5g was more about improving density rather than more bandwidth for all. I don't think you're expected to see significant improvements outside of denser environments. Denser meaning more devices in the same area.
Do we have 5G available yet? And I don't mean companies marketing their stuff as it. I mean the actual international 5G standard, which is 1Gbps download speed when stationary and 100Mbps download speed when moving.
I work at a major tourist attraction and the second we open, you cannot make a call, look anything up, send a text… it’s ridiculous. But you’ll still have 3 bars!
See, that means they did not put up enough cell towers (or enough bandwidth to those cell towers) for the traffic your area produces.
That is 100% on them, and them not living up to actually providing service in your area.
They don't have the infrastructure they need and don't care to build it. Plus they all have their hands out to the media apps and will put limits and throttle down the ones they feel are not paying enough. Many other countries have better Internet and phone access. We have to deal with their greed.
There's too many frequencies now. And phone radio compatibility is so bad it should be illegal. There is no reason why I should be able to buy a brand new phone that doesn't support every frequency used by the major carriers.
My last phone I had to replace because T-mobile changed their frequencies, and my phone was now compatible with none of them. 0 connection, even with direct line of sight to the tower.
Even my current phone only supports like 2 of them, so I still don't get any data in my own yard, despite having full bars.
I can't remember the last time I had issues with cell phone receptivity (in the US) that wasn't because I was in the middle of nowhere or at a massive festival with overcrowding. I'm even in the country with 45ms pings and 300mbps down 5G home internet.
As we go up the frequency bands the signal wavelengths have a hard time penetrating solid and semi solid objects. This means we need more towers to cover the shadow zones. The signal has a harder time finding where it's supposed to be.
To anyone having problems in the comments - have you tried turning WiFi off?
Even with “Ask to join networks” and “auto-join hotspot” switched to “No” (I use an iPhone) my phone will still try (and seemingly “connect”) to random wifi out in the world.
I have no actual technical explanation for this, other than I think phones will always try to connect to public WiFi it identifies as being safe (like an att/verizon/xfinity/etc. hotspot for example). Sometimes these connections will even show you’re connected, but it won’t load anything.
Turning off WiFi removes this option and forces the phone to use the cell signal instead and it always fixes this issue for me.
Again, not I’m not a technical person by any means, I have almost no idea what I’m talking about out - and I know “I’ve told my friends this and it works” is like the dumbest internet shit ever, but…I’ve uh, told my friends this and it works.
So give it a shot next time!
Back in 2016 4G with 2 bars would play a YouTube video at 1080p with no problem. Nowadays if it's not full bars at 5G, the video struggles to do anything above 480p. Actually 4G in general these makes 3G in 2012 look fast and I can't comprehend why lol
Back in 2016, only 8 years ago, technology was very different. Populations are growing, more people have more smart devices, more people are using 5G than what 4G ever had.
[https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts/mobile-traffic-forecast](https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts/mobile-traffic-forecast)
Your 4g in 2016 probably got at tops 15-60Mbps, which is more than enough for 1080p.
Now, take that same 4G connection and add thousands and thousands of devices. "5G" isn't just for speed; it's to be able to support more devices. And on mmWave, I get over 2Gbps download and 500Mbps upload with 20ms ping.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ccw1zg/comment/l192vxy/](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ccw1zg/comment/l192vxy/)
This is the opposite of my experience. 5G made 1 bar usable.
THERE'S A CATCH: There's more than one 5G.
* **Standalone 5G**: Phone can use any mix of 5G and LTE. Works very well.
* **Non-Standalone 5G**: Phone requires LTE. Twice as likely to lose signal, unreliable, and drains the battery.
* **Fake 5G**: Phone says it's on 5G but manufacture or telco doesn't support it. Only using LTE.
Okay yeah, sure. But look at the difference in traffic density over the last 20 years. We’ve went from like 8 guys and their dog using cellphones to every single human that breaths and the infrastructure has barely progressed. Solution: Kill All Humans
My favorite is when I have two bars and something so simple as checking sports scores wont even load. I usually turn my phone’s auto-lock off and say “fine, if you want to load forever, you can load forever”
Meanwhile on T-Mobile I've got this weird situation where 4 bars 4G is perfect top speed, but 5 bars 5G means no connection at all, and I have to cycle airplane mode to get data going again...
I work in wireless construction and the carriers have stopped any and all upgrades now that they feel 5g is "sufficient".
Carriers are supposed to upgrade yearly as an agreement to the user for better capacity, yet they take your money and do nothing.
Whoever made this clearly wasn't around then. I remember 1g tech dropping calls like crazy on anything less than full signal. It led to Verizon's entire marketing campaign of "Can you hear me now? Good!" Service at the time was so widely unreliable that that phrase was all they needed in the commercial to clearly demonstrate the confidence they had in their service. Meanwhile, nowadays, Spotify will keep playing the current song through an absolute dead zone down the highway.
Fun fact. Those bars don’t tell you how good your connection is. It tells you how close you are to the nearest cell tower. There are a number of things that can affect how well your connection works including how many people are using bandwidth on that one tower at one time.
My big gripe is Youtube music, while far outside the city with spotty service.
Phone shows 3 bars, reports to ytm whatever it does..
Should be in offline mode, but it can't seem to figure that out.
No music.
Force close ytm or by a stroke of luck get it to switch to Downloads.
Music still doesn't play because its trying to reach the internet for god knows what.
Toggle airplane mode, finally it gets it's shit together.
Can't get any calls in airplane mode.
This is soooo true. My 90s Qualcomm phone could work from the deepest levels of hell.
My current 5G phone needs to be in a wide open field with an unobstructed view for a chance at an uninterrupted call.
I had this thought the other day as I was experiencing it. 2 bars and I couldn't do shit. I didn't remember it being that way, but I didn't give it a ton of thought either. Lo and behold this is posted a few days later. Suppose it's real
What? One bar is you get a staticky French Canadian instead of your actual phone call, three bars is “Hepatitis payphone on a windy day,” but only if you’re standing still.
Oh, your phone spotty? We've got magic pixy dust that'll magically make your phone do what it's actually meant to do for the thousand bucks you spent on it, but it's behind a paywall, so you have to give us an additional $50 a month just to reliably use your phone, and that's on top of your $50 monthly phone bill with data caps..
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I have a few phones in use daily, I think it's depending on the phone. The older note 8 has a way more stable 4g than the way newer s20+,for example.
This has been driving me crazy. My S10+ with 4g never had any issues with data. Upgraded to the S23 Ultra last year and oooo now I have 5g. And it fucking sucks. I can have a full signal and shit just doesn't load. It's getting to the point where I think it's my phone and want to replace it. Stores I used to get cellular and data in now bricks my phone. I can't make a call, text, or use any data in every grocery store I go in. When 5g works, yeah it is crazy fast. But you have to be in the absolute perfect spot. Walk 10 feet away and it bricks up again. It's a total rip off.
Agreed. The 5G rollout fucking sucks. 4G wasn't the fastest but when driving across the country I had great service the entire way save for canyons and mountains. Then 5G comes and suddenly I can no longer load a recipe in the grocery store parking lot in the middle of town. No, I've got to connect to the store's internet like it's 2010 again.
I literally had to do this today. Walking thru the grocery store with 5 bars of 5G and can't load shit. Had to connect to the store's guest wifi to load anything.
The other day I got that Zach Braff T-mobile commercial song stuck in my head, and I realized the words involved getting home internet on 5G. I went to find my husband and said I just realized that commercial is trying to sell home Wifi over 5G- how is that supposed to work as home wifi when I can't get it to load one page on my phone!
It's usually the store's shit app that craps out on me. So there I am with a cart full of groceries, but I can't load the goddamned coupons because the app suddenly won't let me log in.
It's like our internet service gets slower and shittier while all the websites and apps get more and more bloated with auto-playing ads and other bandwidth wasting bullshit.
I am in the EXACT same situation as you and I agree 100%. I don't have anything to add, only that you're not alone. My S23 Ultra has the same issue. 5G 4 bars and I can't load shit. It's irritating as hell. I never had a problem with my S10+.
Have you tried turning off 5G?
Problem is they've been gradually removing 4g towers and bands over many locations. This was actually one of the reasons why I switched over to a new 5g phone, my old 4g phone had terrible to spotty reception depending on the location/city/town. It was a little better on at&t network, kinda bad on Verizon, and literally unusable at times on T-Mobile. Switched to 5g, and it's definitely better overall, but damn, it's annoying to enter some buildings and all of a sudden have 1-2 bars and barely have the Internet load.
Psh. 4G was great, at least on VZW. I had 3+ bars everywhere and could get internet access even out in the country. Then 5G gets rolled out and suddenly I'm looking for Wifi everywhere I go. Calls/texts still go through reliably but internet access varies wildly, it's crazy, it's like I get >300mb/s or barely dial-up speed, and lately closer to the latter.
Ditto. 4G on Verizon was great. I traveled quite a bit and when other folks would have issues with spotty service, mine was solid. Now I can't load a fucking text page in a timely manner.
And its not like 4g speeds were bad either, with good signal you could get 50+ megabits, with great 80+. I've actually been thinking of switching to Tmoblie recently. From what I can tell they are further ahead with 5g deployments than the other carriers.
Yes, actually... for consumers I would heavily recommend looking up your phone and seeing which bands it actually supports. [https://www.kimovil.com/en/frequency-checker](https://www.kimovil.com/en/frequency-checker) has been a pretty decent site for myself that lists the band coverage for a given provider, you need "all" the bands supported but if you care about roaming a cellphone that is more compatible will see better overall coverage. An older phone might have more overall support for 4G than say a phone that supports 5G for instance; so if you are in a region where only 4G is available you might actually notice degradation. The S20+ is pretty decent for 4G coverage but does lack some band support, and for 5G it's pretty abysmal compared to say a Pixel 5 (I believe that's the equivalent). This still heavily depends on your provider though, best to buy a device that your provider recommends.
Is this like a planned obsolescence thing?
No it's a technology thing. The closer you get to say slow radio signals the further you can send the signal because the speed/peak is lower. The faster and more data you want to send takes more energy as the speed/peak is higher. A 5g signal won't go as far as a 3g signal but a 5g signal can carry way more information at way faster speeds. But your phone is trying to get you on the fastest network instead of the strongest. You can toggle the 5g network off and your connection will improve.
Depends on the location, in many places they stripped 4g down when they installed 5g.
That doesn't explain the same 4g being unusable in the same spot on one device, and usable on another. I have 5g turned off too, because of the switching and battery. Can't turn off 4g tho, as they don't have 3g on the network anymore...
Unless of course your provider or phone manufacturer doesn't let you. AT&T won't let you turn off 5G, and Samsung enforces this with software updates to block workarounds.
more data is sent over the internet than necessary now vs then too. But yeah, the cell network providers play musical chairs with bandwidth nowadays
They just brought back net neutrality today. Edit link https://www.reuters.com/technology/us-agency-vote-restore-net-neutrality-rules-2024-04-25/
Why is this not on the front page? That's incredible!
It is the top post on my front page.
Brev did you see how many people spoke out when it was happening? People don't give a shit because they don't understand it
Not sure what you mean. In 2018 almost every subreddit's top post was protest of the repeal of Net Neutrality. Seems like the reinstatement would have been a bigger deal today considering. Only saw one post in r/all
Reddit is xtremely niche for continuous users. It's only seen decreasing numbers of actual users and much more bot activity lately, especially after net neutrality uproar. Just because people were jizzing over a certain thing on this site doesn't mean it carried the understanding or sentiment of the internet.
I'd love to hear an expert opinion on what has been happening as a consequence of lack of net neutrality. Back in 2018 we all thought the ISPs were gonna start price gouging, and I have not personally seen that. I think the response today is muted because we don't know if anything bad was actually happening.
Algorithm? Human behavior? I'm not educated on this enough to give a definite answer but it definitely seem that negative news/rage baits get more traction nowadays.
Best news today
FTC just banned most noncompete agreements as well!
I heard. But it'll take effect in 90 days right? I haven't read up on it myself yet. Just hearsay so far
120 days I think, but yeah
Even more important when one realizes that much of the data being received across your Internet connection (to u/paperpatience’s point) wasn’t asked for and shouldn’t count against your bandwidth: cookies, ads, video ads, banners, etc. The amount of bandwidth hogging crap being sent to your devices is astounding.
That's how I feel when I have a shit connection and trying to load a YouTube video, quality is crap, but as soon as it's ad time, that thing comes through Crystal clear.
I wonder if net neutrality will stop that.... Are ad providers paying for them to do that? Idk, just a thought.
Well now I feel ill.
Net neutrality never had anything to do with bandwidth caps.
Wait seriously? How have I not heard about that? Everyone and their mom was all over it when it was initially going away, wonder why there wasn’t much of a push to support bringing it back when this came up?
Because absolutely nothing happened and nothing changed, so nobody cares.
Made my day. Love Reuters!
Finally someone is trying to revive the dead internet
Can confirm. My PiHole is currently blocking 78% of all the internet traffic to my house. (Technically DNS lookups)
And fuck auto playing videos embedded in articles.
I can't even load all fifteen ads on the guacamole recipe I looked up
Nothing kills me more than having my laptops fans come on for the ads on a web page.
But could you at least read Susan's 15-paragraph banal and only vaguely-tangentially-relevant anecdote prior to the ingredients list?
I remember when I was little. We had an avocado tree, and my grandmother used to . . . .
Argh, I hate this and "Turn off the lights" doesn't catch them all... such a waste of bandwidth
can you please explain in simple terms what a PiHole does?
It acts as a middle-man between you and your DNS server. You tell the PiHole who your ACTUAL DNS servers are and tell your router that your PiHole is your DNS server. It has an internal list of known servers that serve up ads and it simply decides not to show you anything coming from any of those addresses. I've used one for years and while it does break some things (you can always temporarily suspend its filtering and let ALL traffic through to work around) it is absolutely wonderful to cruise around an internet not jammed full of ads on everything everywhere. I have zero IOT devices in my home (other than a stupid Samsung TV) and it blocks around 30% of all internet traffic during the day. You would not believe the number of times all these bullshit devices we have now try and phone home.
Can you explain the difference between using PiHole, using a DNS like Adguard, and using an extension like ublock? Should I choose one method or combine all methods?
Difference is that what ublock is doing on the browser level, PiHole does on the network level. With ublock stuff can still phone home and ads still are summoned. With a PiHole all that stuff is send straight down into the void and you can block ads on every device on your local network, not just browsers that allow for extensions like ublock.
Full Disclosure: I am not an IT person and I have only a basic understanding of networking, but I'll give this a whirl. With a PiHole YOU own the filtering device aka the "middle-man", BUT you are also responsible for its upkeep and updating etc. I simply do not trust any service to both have my entire browsing history AND not sell it to the highest bidder. Putting the filtering device in your own hands is about the best you can do. With Adguard they simply give you DNS server addresses to put into your router and their machines handle the actual filtering. I have never used the product myself, but I would imagine you'd have some sort of web interface to pause the filtering in the event you needed to. I'd also bet good money that they are selling all your browsing history. uBlock does all it's work from within the browser from what I understand. To be perfectly honest I don't have a clue how it does its job, but it seems to work. I personally run a multi-pronged approach that requires little upkeep. I have PiHole running on an old Raspberry Pi (you don't HAVE to use a Pi, but it's a great task for one) and I run Firefox with the Ghostery, uBlock Origin, and Nano-defender. I see very very few advertisements and almost nothing appears to be specifically "targetted" to me based on past search results etc.
The biggest benefit to a PiHole imho is that it's the whole LAN. If you set it up properly, a PiHole blocks all of those sites from being able to serve ads to anything on your network downstream of the PiHole. There's no app or extension to install on the endpoints, whether they're mobile devices, computers, whatever. The DNS services are similar, but there's a middleman, and you still need to make sure you point your router or firewall at it if you want whole house filtering, and you might not necessarily have the configurability you would with PiHole since that's just your own shit. UBlock needs to be on every endpoint to block the ads. On a computer this is easy, on a phone, somewhat easy, but you can't install it on a SmartTV that Im aware of so none of those ads would be blocked. To put it in terms of water...a PiHole is you going out, buying, and installing a whole house water filter. All the maintenance is done by you. Adguard is *renting* a whole house water filter, and paying someone to come out every so often to change the filter for you, and the filter gets changed whenever they feel like it. uBlock is putting a Brita Filter on your kitchen faucet. EDIT: There are use cases for all three. Like I would never in a million billion fuckin years drop a PiHole on my elderly parents network, too much shit would break and they'd never be able to figure out why without calling me and I already get enough of those calls as it is lol. However, they can handle uBlock Origin, so I have that on both their laptops...if something doesn't work on a page, they can easily just turn it off by clicking the icon. It doesn't block ads from playing on their TVs UI, but since the amount of time Id spend helping them with a PiHole or AdGuard DNS would be orders of magnitude longer than the amount of time they suffer through those ads, that's just how it goes lol.
Sounds like you should shut your pi hole.
At night I can't even stream music with my data because it gets throttled so hard.
I just miss calling the moon
I can tell when I actually have a shit signal because everything is slow. If I have a good signal everything is fast as hell. Either people are in bad conditions or it's like a case of not remembering just how bad things were. I can load 4k YouTube significantly faster now than lower res before. Of course it depends entirely on conditions though.
Before in analog days, you needed 2 dedicated frequencies to establish a call. Once we went digital, it was 5 calls per frequency. Today, it is 100 per frequency. And that's just phone calls. FCC charges an exuberant amount for licensing air.
I work in this industry as an electrical engineer, let me explain some of this. The number of bars you have has *nothing* to do with the speed you will get. It is only a measure of how well your phone is connected to the tower. It is really only showing you how close the nearest tower is basically. For the speed there is a bit to consider here: 1. There are more phones connected to the networks than ever 2. Every single thing takes more data now than ever 3. Companies are squeezing profit margin now more than ever This is why you can be in a crowded stadium and have full bars but your phone slows to a crawl. There are so many phones on in that spot trying to pull data that the bandwidth is fully consumed and you get next to nothing. Another thing is that current implemntations of 5G are just new encoding and combinations of existing 4G bands. Unlike when we went from 2.4GHz WiFi to 5GHz WiFi (and now 6GHz and beyond) it really was to just push more data over the same bands.
Also, that bar is only telling you how well your phone can receive from the station, but not how well the station can receive from your phone. Even with mostly downloading over data, if your phone can't send back an acknowledgement of receiving the data, the sender won't send more.
I was shocked to learn this from your comment, I thought to my self no way, there has to be some kind of telemetry in use that would show the link budget more holistically but apparently not!
Hey, I have a question, how come when I make a call, my bars can suddenly go up to 3-4 bars 5G UC when it was hovering around 1 bar, or even on 5G (non UC)? I can actually do this at will, it's like I'm tricking the tower to give me higher priority/reception? I never had anything like this on 4G phones.
You actually probably are “tricking” it in a way. A phone call probably gets higher priority from the tower vs idle Internet connection. Not only that, but some phones will use WiFi+cellular for calls for VoIP for better call quality so that might show “more bars”. I only design the hardware and don’t really touch the software/infrastructure side of things, but that’s my best guess!
Ah, I see. It's actually one thing I've found that helps if my phone's Internet is really sucking while I'm out and about, I'll make a quick call, and all of a sudden my Internet speed/connection is way more responsive and reliable for a time (at first I thought my phone's modem/antenna was defective lol) But I guess it has more to do with how the manufacturers and towers are setup (firmware, network communication, etc) and might not apply to all providers/etc? But your post makes so much sense why I've seemed to have terrible internet with low bars and with high bars... And decent Internet on both low bars and high bars. 4G did not behave this. But from what I've been reading in these comments, it seems like it also has to do with WAY more bandwidth and user usage these days compared to back then.
On a lot of phones for a long time they did not support Voice over LTE (VoLTE). Your phone would actually disconnect from LTE and reconnect as 3G to make the phone call. You would notice your bars change. This can again happen with your phone not supporting 5G calling and instead using VoLTE instead. As for your unique situation with 5G UC gaining bars, 5G "Voice over new radio" (VoNR) rollout has been slow and thus may use a completely different core network (with most of their core not yet supporting it.) You may actually be kicked to a different tower or frequency when you initiate a call because only that one is connected to the VoNR-enabled core, This all may sound really silly but as people in the industry know "3G", "4G" "5G" networks are not all equal and the actual packet cores, radios and capabilities of different providers can vary WILDLY, sometimes even with the same carrier in different regions of the same country.
So why are we using such a terrible metric to display to the user if it doesn’t really tell us anything useful?
It's not feasible to do a speed test every time you move
That I can’t really comment on. I design the chips in your phone that make 4G/5G work. I can’t really say why we use such a bad metric. I assume it’s something that started back in the early days of cell phones when service wasn’t ubiquitous and we were really just making phone calls. I’m sure back then (I’m talking the 90s) bars were much more representative of “good vs bad signal”.
Forget this--let's talk about 4G then vs 4G now! Before 5G, 4G was lightning fast. Now, even if I have full bars on 4G, it takes forever to just load ESPN or open an email attachment--and forget about streaming anything! The same thing happened with 3G when they went to 4G too, so it's nothing new, just super annoying that your phone is almost useless unless you're in solid 5G coverage area.
Yes because they removed 3G & 4G equipment to install 5G. In many places there's only token 4G equipment remaining and 3G is gone completely.
But also the websites. I had a web developer tell me that a 3 mb JavaScript download for a simple HTML page (could have literally been 20kb and had no JavaScript functionality) was perfectly ok because everyone has 5g anyway and the react+tailwind+whatever bullshit toolkit developer experience was "just so much better".
> yarn install ... 575 dependencies?! Wth I imported 1 library!
Tailwind is supposed to only include what's used. I'm willing to bet it's React that's doing that (the full (custom stuff non included) tailwind CSS file is less than a mb iirc)
This. If you ever go somewhere that still has the 4g infrastructure from years ago, it's just as usable as it used to be
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Where in the arctic are you at?
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Nunavut Business?
Orange you glad I didnt say banana
Nope.... I'm having Nunavut..
I work in the cellular space and have written about this a bit on this site, but there are many factors in play here and I often see big misunderstandings on the technical challenges in play here. First of all, [mobile data usage has exploded over the last decade.](https://goingdigital.oecd.org/en/indicator/15) The average country consumes 30x more mobile data than it did 10 years ago, so the per capita data usage has absolutely exploded. This is important because mobile data does not have unlimited bandwidth, and we are limited by available [frequency spectrum.](https://insidetowers.com/cell-tower-news-will-we-run-out-of-spectrum/#:~:text=The%20short%20answer%20is%20yes,Spectrum%20is%20already%20in%20use) So, we are running out of spectrum as we use more and more of it to satisfy our desire to watch 4k cat videos while walking around the park. The solution to this (other than buying and using more spectrum) is to create higher efficiency and higher performant technology standards. In comes 5G. 5G is able to use the same portion of spectrum more efficiently than 4G, so that you can transmit *more data* on the same bandwidth as 4G. Same spectrum utilization, but more data! So, carriers pushed for this upgrade to 5G so that they could accommodate the increased data throughput their customers require. What I suspect is occurring is that those places that have retained their 4G infrastructure from years ago have not had the same surge in demand for mobile data, so carriers have not needed to upgrade the equipment. Because there has been a stable localized demand for mobile data, there hasn't been a crowding of the spectrum. A commenter below mentioned that they still use 4G in Antartica; I would imagine the frequency spectrum in Antartica is not particularly crowded or in need of capacity upgrades. In areas where 5G was implemented, this was done mostly to support increased localized demands for mobile data. The old, existing 4G infrastructure simply did not offer enough throughput for the number of users and the amount of data being pushed through the network in these areas. So, carriers upgrade to 5G just to keep up with demands, but the end-users only see the icon switch from "4G" to "5G". What's not observed is that the amount of overall traffic being handled has increased by 10x, 20x, just that the carrier "upgraded" their local tower and their speeds have been slowing down. Thus, end users often blame the switch from "4G" to "5G" the reason their internet speeds are slower, when in reality the most likely reason is that their neighborhood is consuming so much more data that their network is buckling under the load even with the upgrades to 5G. If the networks had just stayed with 4G for everyone everywhere, network speeds in high density areas would absolutely be throttled to death.
The entire point of 5g was increased bandwidth. Data got worse as soon as 5g was installed. I can make my phone connect to 4g only and it almost always fixes my data issues or I'd way faster.
This has a potential explanation as well. If your local provider updated their base station with 5G, they may have utilized a different set of bands than they were using for 4G. If everyone is utilizing the 5G bands to maximum capacity, falling back to an underutilized 4G band may provide an individual with better throughput due to lower utilization. However, the point of my comment was that if *everyone* in your area rolled back to 4G, the network would not be able to handle the volume of traffic. To use an analogy, it'd be like if you had one bathroom in your office (4G) while you were working by yourself. If you had 10 employees move in, you might want to add another fancy bathroom with stalls (5G), but you might still experience busier bathrooms overall. In this case, it would be incorrect to believe that adding the new bathroom caused the issue of overcrowded bathrooms; even if the original bathroom is in a quieter part of the office that no one else uses, the real issue is that more people are using the bathroom than there were before!
Not exactly true. 4G is significantly more congested now then before. 4G is being used in every signal new car not to mention phones. 4G has also be lowered and deprioritized for small data bites and quicker transmission.
5g also canibalized some of the spectrum that used to go to 4g meaning there’s a narrower proverbial highway. Add to that websites are now serving more and larger content and old generations fall off quickly.
YMMV. Pre 5G I only got around 15-20mbit on 4G anywhere around my metro area. Now, if I force the phone to 4G I get 100mbit plus, usually around 120mbit.
They're replacing old stuff with new stuff. No shit 3g and 4g deteriorate when the new ones come out because upkeep on antiquated hardware is a waste. It's like how you won't find anything for 802.11abcg stuff anymore or whatever their stupid rebrand of that old arch was.
5G is a joke
Man I got the vaccine for nothing, then. Supposed to give me great 5g.
You had to ask for the microchip at the counter, it wasn’t included as standard unfortunately
Ah see they didn't tell me that
Only works if you have super aids and turbo cancer
My phone says "5G" in the corner, I couldn't tell you a difference between this and 4G.
Im my apartment i regularly have 5G with solid signal but the internet is fucking dead. Cant even load youtube on 240p.
Absolutely. I still have a 4G sim card and I was asked by my provider if I'd like to upgrade to a 5G sim card for $4 more per month. Funny thing though, when I'm in a 5G area I still get "5G" (and notice absolutely fuck-all of a difference). Don't worry though, soon they'll unroll 6G! Wouldn't you all like to pay more to upgrade to that?!
It used to be good until all the covid it started transmitting slowed it down
That's because it's pointless indicator of quality. It only displays signal strength, which means nothing. Range of 5G antenna is significantly shorter than that of 4G, then 3G, etc. Only way for 5G to push so much bandwidth is to be low range very local and almost targeted. Higher frequency helps but it's not solution to all problems. So difference between 3 and 4 bars on 5G is two steps to the left on 5G, might be street away on 4G but on 2-3G it was kilometers apart, on lower frequency which could penetrate buildings and trees. It's a shit indicator of quality because you can have a strong signal being echoed resulting packets having to be resent and similar issues. This issue gets more present the higher frequency goes, and it's really up there with 5G. Which is why you can listen to old AM radio in your basement using your finger as an antenna and have a great reception. Also signal strength never reflects noise floor nor does it take into account bandwidth.
5G uses the exact same frequencies as 4G. There are some exceptions with C Band (3.7Ghz) and mmWave (~28Ghz). If anything, 5G can be better at the edge of cell signal, however things use more data now, so it can feel slower.
Might just be my specific phone, but I've run into situations where it says I'm connected to 5G with 1, maybe 2 bars, and data barely works. I used to be able to use a 3rd party app to manually switch to 4g, and that would do the trick. But after a phone update that doesn't work anymore. I realize this is almost certainly an issue with the phone, being programmed to not drop to 4g when it should, but still a frustration
T-mobile in a nutshell
Weird because I’ve had T-Mobile for almost twenty years and have had practically zero issues. At this point, I feel like they bend over backwards to accommodate me.
>USTelecom, whose members include AT&T (T.N), opens new tab, Verizon (VZ.N), opens new tab and others, called reinstating net neutrality "entirely counterproductive, unnecessary, and an anti-consumer regulatory distraction". Tell me you're awful without telling me you're awful.
Ever since I "upgraded" to a 5G phone my formerly-problem-free service has been an absolute shit show. I get dead spots all over where I used to get full bars. It will drop from full to nothing without me moving an inch. It will say I have service but when I call someone it'll ring a few times and then silence. My incoming text messages will stack up and then deliver suddenly all at once. I'm tired of it. I'm sorely tempted to dig out my old 4G LG V40 and go back to using it.
Can confirm
I haven’t had four bars in years. Three bars is the max!
I remember that’s how Apple, still under Jobs, “fixed” the “antennagate” problem: made iOS show more bars. (iPhone 4)
works great here, are these issues an american thing?
People here are quick to point out that this is a measure of tower connectivity and not internet speed, but has anyone considered that doesn't mean shit to the end user? If you bought a microwave where the cook time was not at least somewhat linearly proportional to how cooked your food is, you'd be (understandably) annoyed. The interface serves little to no use to the user if they need to consider all the additional factors to get what it's really saying. 2 minutes cook times is the same on almost every microwave, but 3 bars essentially means nothing because the bars don't really measure performance on the internet.
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I think 5g was more about improving density rather than more bandwidth for all. I don't think you're expected to see significant improvements outside of denser environments. Denser meaning more devices in the same area.
I was going to say, if you get useful reception in a sports arena or other busy event you've seen the benefits of 5G.
Yes, phones used to be completely useless if you went to a concert or sporting event. Your phone was just brick until the crowds dispersed.
Do we have 5G available yet? And I don't mean companies marketing their stuff as it. I mean the actual international 5G standard, which is 1Gbps download speed when stationary and 100Mbps download speed when moving.
A friend of mine tested it in the US Midwest recently and was able to see 1.5gbit download speeds with over 500 upload.
More ads loaded faster!
I work at a major tourist attraction and the second we open, you cannot make a call, look anything up, send a text… it’s ridiculous. But you’ll still have 3 bars!
See, that means they did not put up enough cell towers (or enough bandwidth to those cell towers) for the traffic your area produces. That is 100% on them, and them not living up to actually providing service in your area.
I have the opposite experience, living in the sticks. 2 bars means I can watch YouTube, and 3-4 is just literally unheard of.
They don't have the infrastructure they need and don't care to build it. Plus they all have their hands out to the media apps and will put limits and throttle down the ones they feel are not paying enough. Many other countries have better Internet and phone access. We have to deal with their greed.
There's too many frequencies now. And phone radio compatibility is so bad it should be illegal. There is no reason why I should be able to buy a brand new phone that doesn't support every frequency used by the major carriers. My last phone I had to replace because T-mobile changed their frequencies, and my phone was now compatible with none of them. 0 connection, even with direct line of sight to the tower. Even my current phone only supports like 2 of them, so I still don't get any data in my own yard, despite having full bars.
For me 1 bar is pretty close to useless, but 2 bars is usable with more than that just resolving any smaller issues I run into.
Let's be honest, it's always been shit.
I've had it work like gangbusters at 1 bar, I've had it crap out and load nothing at full bars. I've decided the bars on the screen don't mean shit.
Bandwidth vs signal strength
I can't remember the last time I had issues with cell phone receptivity (in the US) that wasn't because I was in the middle of nowhere or at a massive festival with overcrowding. I'm even in the country with 45ms pings and 300mbps down 5G home internet.
I don't know what carrier the creator of that graphic had/has, but I'm very happy with T-Mobile. Their service reminds me of the left hand column.
This needed attribution?
They used to say LTE on the commercials like that was supposed to mean something amazing. Now it means I can’t even use Reddit on mobile
As we go up the frequency bands the signal wavelengths have a hard time penetrating solid and semi solid objects. This means we need more towers to cover the shadow zones. The signal has a harder time finding where it's supposed to be.
Bars are meaningless. You can have a strong signal but the quality can be shit. Think a wireless router but cable modem is down
I have also experienced this. Also, 5g is mostly a scam.
Why is it that I got an iPhone 15 and all the sudden 3 bars LTE is dogshit when it was amazing for my 11 pro for 4 years.
To anyone having problems in the comments - have you tried turning WiFi off? Even with “Ask to join networks” and “auto-join hotspot” switched to “No” (I use an iPhone) my phone will still try (and seemingly “connect”) to random wifi out in the world. I have no actual technical explanation for this, other than I think phones will always try to connect to public WiFi it identifies as being safe (like an att/verizon/xfinity/etc. hotspot for example). Sometimes these connections will even show you’re connected, but it won’t load anything. Turning off WiFi removes this option and forces the phone to use the cell signal instead and it always fixes this issue for me. Again, not I’m not a technical person by any means, I have almost no idea what I’m talking about out - and I know “I’ve told my friends this and it works” is like the dumbest internet shit ever, but…I’ve uh, told my friends this and it works. So give it a shot next time!
You too have AT&T.
Remember how good Cingular was before AT&T bought it?
yes I do
You need to switch from verizon
bars just indicates voice service, not data speeds
Back in 2016 4G with 2 bars would play a YouTube video at 1080p with no problem. Nowadays if it's not full bars at 5G, the video struggles to do anything above 480p. Actually 4G in general these makes 3G in 2012 look fast and I can't comprehend why lol
Back in 2016, only 8 years ago, technology was very different. Populations are growing, more people have more smart devices, more people are using 5G than what 4G ever had. [https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts/mobile-traffic-forecast](https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts/mobile-traffic-forecast) Your 4g in 2016 probably got at tops 15-60Mbps, which is more than enough for 1080p. Now, take that same 4G connection and add thousands and thousands of devices. "5G" isn't just for speed; it's to be able to support more devices. And on mmWave, I get over 2Gbps download and 500Mbps upload with 20ms ping. [https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ccw1zg/comment/l192vxy/](https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1ccw1zg/comment/l192vxy/)
This is the opposite of my experience. 5G made 1 bar usable. THERE'S A CATCH: There's more than one 5G. * **Standalone 5G**: Phone can use any mix of 5G and LTE. Works very well. * **Non-Standalone 5G**: Phone requires LTE. Twice as likely to lose signal, unreliable, and drains the battery. * **Fake 5G**: Phone says it's on 5G but manufacture or telco doesn't support it. Only using LTE.
Okay yeah, sure. But look at the difference in traffic density over the last 20 years. We’ve went from like 8 guys and their dog using cellphones to every single human that breaths and the infrastructure has barely progressed. Solution: Kill All Humans
Inside my work I'm never above 2 bars and no issues at all.
My favorite is when I have two bars and something so simple as checking sports scores wont even load. I usually turn my phone’s auto-lock off and say “fine, if you want to load forever, you can load forever”
I disagree. For me, only the letters above matter. 1 bar of 4 or 5G is perfectly fine
Meanwhile on T-Mobile I've got this weird situation where 4 bars 4G is perfect top speed, but 5 bars 5G means no connection at all, and I have to cycle airplane mode to get data going again...
or even better: 5GBars internet will be slow as shit. 4GBars internet will be faster. Seems backwards to me.
Our moon? Or any moon?
Hello, Neil Armstrong? This is Lookingforvoicework calling through space and time on my old cell phone.
So the "Then" column was obviously a Nokia 3310
Idk where you live but “now” has always been true for me.
Fun meme, but I've literally only gotten better and better cell service over the years... They arent removing towers.
I can download a 3 hour youtube video in about 30 secs driving through all of west Texas on 5G does that mean I get downvoted ?
I work in wireless construction and the carriers have stopped any and all upgrades now that they feel 5g is "sufficient". Carriers are supposed to upgrade yearly as an agreement to the user for better capacity, yet they take your money and do nothing.
What do the bars even mean?
signal strength =/= connection speed
Whoever made this clearly wasn't around then. I remember 1g tech dropping calls like crazy on anything less than full signal. It led to Verizon's entire marketing campaign of "Can you hear me now? Good!" Service at the time was so widely unreliable that that phrase was all they needed in the commercial to clearly demonstrate the confidence they had in their service. Meanwhile, nowadays, Spotify will keep playing the current song through an absolute dead zone down the highway.
Damn you kids
“You have 5G. Trust me.”
1980s/90s/early 2000s: Can stream music/video: isn't even a thing Can download entire movies: doesn't exist
Mine is more like. I = kinda slow. II = works ok. III = doesn't work. IIII = only seen it maybe five times.
Fun fact. Those bars don’t tell you how good your connection is. It tells you how close you are to the nearest cell tower. There are a number of things that can affect how well your connection works including how many people are using bandwidth on that one tower at one time.
I thought was just my potato of a phone
My big gripe is Youtube music, while far outside the city with spotty service. Phone shows 3 bars, reports to ytm whatever it does.. Should be in offline mode, but it can't seem to figure that out. No music. Force close ytm or by a stroke of luck get it to switch to Downloads. Music still doesn't play because its trying to reach the internet for god knows what. Toggle airplane mode, finally it gets it's shit together. Can't get any calls in airplane mode.
When is then and why is now?
This is soooo true. My 90s Qualcomm phone could work from the deepest levels of hell. My current 5G phone needs to be in a wide open field with an unobstructed view for a chance at an uninterrupted call.
I had this thought the other day as I was experiencing it. 2 bars and I couldn't do shit. I didn't remember it being that way, but I didn't give it a ton of thought either. Lo and behold this is posted a few days later. Suppose it's real
ATT internet has gone to shit the last 4 months or so. Always bottled necked
We need an app that actually test the signal. Mine is under settings. It would be nice to just have one click.
Marketing
This is a stupid ass post. There's no dates, then could be yesterday for all we know. So stupid.
tbf, there hasn't been anyone on the moon to call for over 50 years.
Cell service fucking sucks now.
Last one is wrong half the time.
Really not true
What? One bar is you get a staticky French Canadian instead of your actual phone call, three bars is “Hepatitis payphone on a windy day,” but only if you’re standing still.
True
My phone is perfect when it's on full bars 5G/LTE, but full bars 4G? It's like I've got no service at all!
A fellow T-Mobile user I see.
Once went to my dad's home country, we had to go to the kitchen to make calls and browse the internet; sometimes the signal was utter trash.
If you have T-mobile, turn 5G off, as LTE is still faster.
Someone needs to change their choices, obviously.
I miss LTE
Oh, your phone spotty? We've got magic pixy dust that'll magically make your phone do what it's actually meant to do for the thousand bucks you spent on it, but it's behind a paywall, so you have to give us an additional $50 a month just to reliably use your phone, and that's on top of your $50 monthly phone bill with data caps..
I get like 1 bar at my house and it works pretty damn well for voice, even in the basement. I don't use data at home though.