Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband compared to a 56K dial-up modem

Our neighborhood in Jupiter, Abacoa (created by the MacArthur Foundation), is home to a Major League Baseball training stadium at which the St. Louis Cardinals and Miami Marlins practice. A light post beyond the outfield bristles with mobile phone antennae, which presumably includes one for Verizon. Sitting in the stands, exactly one baseball field away from these antennae, I was unable to use a web browser. Here’s a Speedtest result:

Decoding the above: Max signal strength. On the new 5G Ultra Wideband network that Verizon advertises. Sub-LTE download speed. Upload speed, which is presumably making it tough for me to request pages, almost the same as a 56K modem dialing up AOL on an analog phone line (see Brent Townshend’s patent filed in 1994, which kept patent litigators busy for even longer than Verizon kept me waiting for web pages).

Young people: AOL was like Facebook and Twitter except that you wouldn’t be kicked off for saying that you believed masking kindergarteners wouldn’t stop an aerosol virus. Also, the typical user didn’t spend time and energy raging against things done by governors and legislatures of states other than the user’s own.

6 thoughts on “Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband compared to a 56K dial-up modem

  1. This looks like it warrants a call to support. Did you try changing to LTE and then doing speedtest ?

    I recently bought a T-mobile 5G phone and its roughly 300/15 with 5 bar. I was hoping the speeds would be more symmetrical for use as a hotspot.

  2. I still do not see 5G displayed on my Samsung A42 5G Verizon phone anywhere in a 15 mile radius of my home. I know – I’m in the “woods” but it’s still Massachusetts, it’s not like I’m in the middle of the Sahara.

    It “feels” more and more to me like 5G was hugely hyped so that people would pay in advance for it, so that the companies offering it could preload it into their products, but sit on the money to actually build it out until they were damn good and ready. Or maybe it just doesn’t really work in the real world at any price, and they’re going to switch us over to 6G phones next year. They will be a little faster than 4G LTE and 5G will be deprecated as a standard that sounded great at the time but didn’t work well in 95% of the places they tried it.

    It’ll be like Windows ME. “Oops! Cleanup in Aisle Four! Thanks for the money, though!”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Me

    • As supporting evidence for this hypothesis, I give you the Ozzy Osbourne/Justin Bieber 2011 Superbowl XLV commercial, where Bieber was already foreshadowing 6G and Ozzy wondered “How Many Bloody Gs Are There?”

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKpd6XvII-g

      Is really good advance hype+real world surprise considered exculpatory in the largest class-action lawsuit in history? Because it looks a lot to me like 5G is a gigantic trainload of horses**t.

    • Not only is 5G hyped, if you are on AT&T and you have a non-AT&T phone (unlocked) you could lose connection to voice calls. Two of my family members have had this problem, the only solution is to replace the phone with an AT&T phone.

      We confirmed this with my local AT&T store, here in Maskachusetts, the sales guy told us many customers are running into this issue.

  3. I hope Verizon 5G fails miserably and they have to eat every one of the butt-ugly antennae they have erected everywhere in our town. The lower band 5G like T-Mobile seems to work about like 4G, so it’s just misleading rather than fraud.

  4. Sounds normal for a packed stadium but if Greenspun was the only one in the stadium, it could mean no-one cares enough about the Miami Marlins to bother powering up the phone tower. At least in Calif*, the only team anyone cares about is the Bosox, because they’re all from MIT.

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