5G beamforming is not that accurate a proxy signal, and mmWave is phone vaporware, instead only significantly used for point-to-point connections. Line-of-sight requirements make it dead in the water for anything else.
"5G UW" is good service, but it's not usually mmWave. It's primarily mid-band stuff, usually Band n77 (3.7ghz C-Band)
It's usually good, but that's primarily because Verizon is going a good-ish job (in Michigan, at least) of deploying it densely in smaller neighborhood/urban cell sites (2x to 3x site density over traditional PCS-spaced cell towers). It's basically Verizon's version of what Clear was supposed to be doing with WiMax.
Notably, C-Band is not mmWave. mmWave bands start at like the 24.2ghz+, way way higher up the spectrum band.
If your phone reads "5G UW", there's like a 95% chance you aren't on mmWave, you are on n77 / C-Band / 'mid-band'.
I regularly see it in Atlanta in the big tech business areas (Buckhead, Midtown, etc) but it is hilariously bad.
Whenever I notice my cellular data has regressed to 3G speeds and reliability, I look up at the network status and see “5G UW”.
I don’t know if they deployed it without enough bandwidth on the trunk to handle all of the users or something else but I generally have to toggle airplane mode to drop back into 5G or LTE to get off of it.
"5G UW" is marketing bullshit by Verizon that they force cellphone makers to display. Basically it originally meant "mmWave" but was later revised to "mmWave or mid-band". You are probably seeing the mid-band due to the limitations of mmWave.
What about convention centers, subway platforms, and other places where you have a lot of people packed together outside the reach of exterior towers? They stick microcells on the ceilings of these — wouldn't it make sense for those to be mmWave?
Not really, because many cheaper phones don't have mmWave antennas. Nor do some international iPhones.
Aside from that, mmWave's biggest application is high-speed connections, not necessarily large client capacity per cell (although there is correlation). For subways I'd probably want the lowest band 4G or 5G cells for maximum penetration.
Convention centers are not really a good application for micro cells, as you have ample time to do a professional WiFi setup. Something like 5000 people should be serviceable by a 10Gb/s backhaul.
I could see stadiums being a good application for mmWave. Scant few foreigners visit American sports games, media wants/needs lot of backhaul, peaks of 30 000 visitors is definitely very hard to manage with WiFi.
mmWave in American cities is a horrible application though. Americans love building vertically, which greatly hampers mmWave viability.
Nokia is also currently rolling out Europe’s first 5G standalone mmWave Radio Access Network in Italy. More to the point though, it could be integral in how we deal with NTN - particularly LEO D2C provisioning
It never worked unless you were walking on the street. Expensive too, I heard $20 per antenna. Millimeter is good for fixed antenna and delivering internet last mile to homes. Verizon bought into it millimeter while TMobile focused on mid bands, why T-Mobile is faster on average than Verizon. People use their phones indoors.
Stadiums are pretty much the only place where mmWave in phones makes sense. For the other 99.99% of usage, it's an expensive power-hungry extra radio that doesn't work. mmWave 5G is mostly a sunk cost for Verizon, and largely irrelevant to everyone else.
>it's an expensive power-hungry extra radio that doesn't work
Yes, it requires more power.
You have to consider power and the time the radio needs to be on to accomplish the task.
If using mmWave you can transfer data at 2,000Mbps and using midband you achieve 500Mbps the baseband will be on for 4x the time with midband, and it will need to use less than 1/4th the power of mmWave to break even.
Midband does not require 1/4th the power of mmWave. Closer to 1/2th.
On 11/27/22 at 5:13pm I was in the St. Louis airport and ran a speed test on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. I was probably one of the first non-diagnostic users of their mmWave infrastructure and I must have been the only user at the time because I achieved a damn-near-practical-maximum of 3938Mbps down. The only reason I ran the speed test at all was that a notoriously sluggish web application I was using was performing spectacularly.
Since then I have been running speed tests at concerts, sporting events, traffic jams, airports, shopping centers, and the Rennaissance Faire. All locations where, prior to 5G, cellular coverage was useless.
On 10/13/24 at 1:14pm I was in a crowded terminal at Chicago O'Hare and ran a speed test on an iPhone 15 Pro Max. Connected via mmWave I achieved 1869Mbps down.
> Stadiums are pretty much the only place where mmWave in phones makes sense.
And Airports, and Parks, and Ampitheateaters, and Malls, and Theme Parks...
mmWave isn't a general solution, sure. But mmWave is great for anywhere crowded enough to benefit from a DAS setup, and there are a lot of DAS setups around.
In any case it was a much better solution than band 46 license assisted access LTE-A/NR-U which used unlicensed 5Ghz spectrum shared with wifi. If we want to talk about vaporware/abandoned stuff, this was among the most controversial and least deployed solutions to those areas before mmwave became a thing.
Neither did LTE (or VoLTE) work well at the start.
WiMAX didn't get the funding and backing primarily because it didn't integrate well with existing systems. Hilariously it fit the criteria as 4G before LTE did. I guess there was a strong vendor push to include LTE into 4G.
I had one of the few laptop models with WiMAX built-in, and I tried it several times. The only time it worked was on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, surprising me completely. But even then, the connection speed was lower than of my 3G USB modem.
They did - it was an atypically awful engineering decision that caused them to bungle their 5G rollout and cede market share to TMobile.
It only makes sense as a cable tv displacement that’s easier to deploy (and cuts out their unions) in cities. But to my knowledge, they haven’t done that. They dtoppef hundreds of poles in my city that aren’t even active.
