New research from SignalTracker, which runs a popular Android mobile app (but not iOS) for monitoring and examining mobile phone reception, appears to show that although your handset may say 5G, it frequently only has a 4G connection. In UK samples, when the 5G icon was displaying, 38% of tests were in fact found to be a 4G connection.
“This is because most phones show 5G when the base station to which they are connected has 5G equipment potentially available. The actual connection may be 4G or 5G,” said the study. “On some phones the icon becomes more distinct when an actual 5G connection is made, but on other phones the same icon is shown whether 5G is merely available or whether it is actually connected.”
The issue described upon is indeed a familiar one, although until now we haven’t seen any UK studies that have attempted to examine how much of an impact it makes. “Actual 5G is about twice as fast [mobile broadband] as icon-only connections, averaging 49Mbps as against 27Mbps in our tests,” said the report.
The results come from all the UK mobile networks, but SignalTracker said displaying the 5G icon when there is only a 4G connection is “more common with some operators than others“. For example, for Three UK, the 5G icon means real 5G some 94% of the time and for Vodafone the figure is 93%. But for O2, only 66% of 5G tests had a genuine 5G connection, and surprisingly for EE it was just 32%.
The latter is unexpected, particularly as EE generally does quite well in other surveys of 5G based data performance and its coverage is often regarded as being quite strong.
Managing Director, Martin Sims, said:
“This issue is not being clearly explained to consumers. Achieving a 5G connection everywhere may not be possible and most people will accept this. But the public deserve clear information about what they are getting.
Mobile networks are an amazing engineering achievement. The best way to get public support for optimising this incredible technology is to keep them fully informed.”
The figures quoted come from over 11,000 tests carried out by PolicyTracker over the past two months, using the SignalTracker service.