AT&T Opens Pre-Orders for Its First Consumer 5G Phone - PCMag

AT&T Opens Pre-Orders for Its First Consumer 5G Phone - PCMag

AT&T's 5G is finally going public—just not the best kind.

The carrier;s first consumer 5G phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ 5G, is available for pre-order starting today for $1,299.99. But you shouldn't buy it, because although AT&T just announced a much broader rollout of 5G, the Note 10+ can't deliver the super-speedy 5G performance you've been hearing about.

The Note 10+ 5G supports AT&T's low-band 5G network, which will be launching in Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Providence, Rochester, and San Diego in the next few weeks, and in Birmingham, Boston, Bridgeport, Buffalo, Las Vegas, Louisville, Milwaukee, New York, San Francisco, and San Jose by Febuary 2020.

It doesn't support AT&T's millimeter-wave (mmWave) 5G network, which is currently available only to business customers in parts of 21 cities. I've tested it and found it to be fast but with very limited coverage.

Now, AT&T phones are now going to show three different kinds of 5G icons: the "5G E" icon, which is just 4G; a "5G" icon on the new Galaxy Note 10+ 5G, which represents low-band 5G coverage, and a "5G+" icon on other 5G phones, for the fast mmWave system.

AT&T has an online PDF of rough maps of its low-band 5G coverage, but they are very zoomed out and not very helpful. Mostly, they show that the new system covers a lot of ground—which it should, because it's using traditional, long-range cellular airwaves. And because it doesn't use very much of those airwaves, it won't feel much different from 4G.

The company isn't giving a firm date for when the Note 10+ 5G will arrive in buyers' hands, except to say that it's with the launch of the low-band 5G network in the "coming weeks."

Hunting High Band and Low Band

5G is primarily a new way of encoding information as it flies through the air. When people talk about 5G as offering gigabit speeds or needing towers every three blocks, they're talking about high-band, millimeter-wave 5G. But 5G can operate on the same frequencies and towers, with the same behavior, as 4G. That's low-band 5G. Initially, there won't be an advantage to using 5G over 4G at low frequencies. They behave pretty much the same. The advantage comes down the road in two phases.

Currently, 5G networks are non-standalone, which means they need 4G to set up their connections. When carriers switch over to standalone networks in late 2020, much lower latencies will kick in; options for better guaranteed quality of service will come down the pike too. This is important for things like self-driving cars, which may not be transferring very much data, but that data needs to be delivered instantly and reliably.

As carriers switch more frequencies over to 5G and phones become able to use the whole "layer cake" of frequencies—low, middle, and high—carriers will be able to aggregate them, bonding together all the available channels in a location for a better experience.

AT&T will initially be rolling out low-band 5G on a reserved segment of its 850MHz spectrum, according to Ars Technica. This service uses an extremely small amount of spectrum and as a result will be very slow, not differentiating itself much from 4G. Ookla technical evangelist Milan Milanovic estimated on Twitter that AT&T could be using as little as 5MHz of spectrum in New York City, which could accelerate AT&T's network by no more than 30Mbps. That's well within the range of ordinary 4G enhancements.

T-Mobile and US Cellular also have near-term low-band 5G plans. T-Mobile is turning on its low-band 5G network on Dec. 6, using somewhere between 15 and 31MHz of 600MHz spectrum in each location and covering about 200 million people. In the first quarter of 2020, US Cellular will turn on a low-band 5G network in Iowa and Wisconsin using about 10MHz of spectrum. In all of those cases, the burden will be on them to show that the 5G experience is better than 4G.

AT&T's service plans are stingy on 5G, as well, but I understand why. 5G service will be available only with the $75 Unlimited Extra and $85 Unlimited Elite plans. Neither will have unlimited hotspot use—Extra will have 15GB of hotspot, and Elite will have 30GB. Both also have deprioritization thresholds—50GB for Extra, and 100GB for Elite.

These are basically 4G plans because, as I pointed out above, it's for basically 4G service. 5MHz of low-band 5G is not going to deliver the capacity improvements needed for unlimited hotspot allotments and transformative service plans.

Wait for the S11

It's interesting that AT&T is giving maps as of February 2020, because February 2020 is when I expect some of this confusion to get straightened out. I currently anticipate that the Samsung Galaxy S11 and LG V60, both of which I anticipate being announced around then, will be the first phones to handle the entire "layer cake" of 5G options—low band, mid-band, and mmWave.

We like the Note 10+ a lot, 5G or no. It's a big, powerful and elegant phone. But in the short term, 5MHz of 5G is going to be more of an symbol than an experience. Verizon has shown with its recent mmWave 5G coverage maps that although it's a slog, it can eventually extend mmWave 5G over neighborhoods like downtown Chicago and downtown Minneapolis. For the best 5G experience, a phone needs to go both low and high.

2019-11-25 11:00:00Z
https://www.pcmag.com/news/372147/at-t-opens-pre-orders-for-its-first-consumer-5g-phone

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