so this is an actual 5g cell site location here in the East Village you can see that the 5g site is sort of a small rectangle on top of a longer vertical rectangle and there are other 4G sites around it the 5g t mobile site allows sort of this high band millimeter wave to kind of cast a spectrum down and you’re able to access these higher speeds if you’re in the vicinity around it so what is 5g anyway it’s the next generation or G of cellular service 2g was more focused on text messaging 3G was sort of the boom of apps 4G introduced faster speech so it could handle uber or FaceTime now 5g is supposed to be ten times as fast and it’ll be able to support self-driving cars robotic surgeries even toothbrushes that can tell you when you’re sick t-mobile’s 5g network is only in a few cities for now but it has an aggressive plan to roll out to the rest of the country by next year AT&T CNN’s parent company is more focused on helping businesses and Verizon is all about speed but I quickly notice staying on it’s 5g network was a challenge Sprint had the most seamless coverage giving me a glimpse into what life with 5g can really look like but it also had slower speeds than some of the other providers you can see how close we are to the 5g sales night right there in the building above the Starbucks but I can’t even get on the network I’m just only a couple hundred feet away oh wait okay I got it we did a test on team ovals for G and 5g connections in the park the 5g network was significantly faster but it didn’t quite hit the high speeds I saw on other networks so I’m getting really great 5g service right here at the Starbucks and the 5g cell site is right above me but left happens if I go inside and there we go just it just drops just now some people might think that they’re already using 5g on my phone actually it says 5ge which stands for 5g evolution you’re using much faster Network but you’re not actually using 5g that’s actually because you need one of these phones this is a Samsung 5g phone it costs $1300 there are other options on the market too LG has one that’s almost $1000 that’s still really expensive for a network that might not work that great for you and you might not even have access to it so the hyper 5g is high and for good reason there’s so many different applications that’s really going to change probably the way we live but for now service is super spotty it’s really limited it’s expensive and it’s going to take so long for these companies to truly put the equipment and all the different buildings and the lampposts across the country so you might just want to sit tight and wait for them to work out the kinks
