When 5G was first being conceived, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) set two specific 5G download speed requirements. First was a Peak Data Throughput of 20 Gbps on the downlink. The second was a User Experienced Data Rate (the average for real-world conditions) of 100 Mbps on the downlink, according to Viet Nguyen, director of public relations and technology at 5G Americas. 
There’s an ocean-size difference between 20 Gbps and 100 Mbps. In the U.S., the operators haven’t even reached the ITU goal of at least 100 Mbps for 5G download speeds.
FierceWireless recently reported that data from Opensignal showed that 5G download speeds from the three big U.S. operators are in the 47 Mbps to 58 Mbps range. This comes nowhere close to the promised 5G downlink speeds of 100 Mbps. T-Mobile (TMUS) took top honors with 58 Mbps. The U.S. carriers trail the rest of the world badly, as the graphic from Statista shows.
Opensignal gathers its data by collecting billions of individual measurements daily from over 100 million devices on every major network operator around the globe.
5G download speed
Based on this data, T-Mobile beat the other two carriers with an average 5G download speed of 58.1 Mbps. That is an increase from 49.2 Mbps. Meanwhile, 5G download speeds actually fell on both Verizon’s and AT&T’s networks. AT&T (T) download speeds dropped from 60.8 Mbps to 53.8 Mbps. And Verizon‘s (VZ) 5G download speeds dropped from a whopping 494.7 Mbps to 47.4 Mbps.
Ian Fogg, an Opensignal analyst, told Fierce that the dramatic drop in Verizon’s 5G download speeds is their network architecture. In earlier reports, Verizon’s 5G network was mostly based on mmWave spectrum. VZ was delivering super-fast speeds, but the availability of its 5G network was only 0.4%. He explained “Now, Verizon has launched 5G on lower-band spectrum [sub-6 GHz], and its availability has gone up to 9.5%, but speed has gone down.”
Mr. Fogg said that the U.S. carriers have been constrained by their access to mid-band spectrum. “The most popular spectrum type globally is 3.5 GHz … Most networks globally have used that as their only 5G band. And that’s why in most countries download speeds are five to six times faster than 4G with an average of 300 Mbps.”
5G connection time
U.S. 5G users are connected to 5G only 21 percent of the time. According to the Opensignal data, T-Mobile is also beating Verizon and AT&T in terms of 5G availability. Opensignal found that customers of all three carriers have seen much greater time connected to an active 5G signal than in its previous reports. T-Mobile is seeing the best 5G availability since it’s been expanding its network with the 2.5 GHz spectrum it got from Sprint.
T-Mobile users were connected to 5G about 30.1% of the time, a jump from 22.5%. AT&T 5G users saw an increase from 10.3% to 18.8%. Verizon users saw availability jump from 0.4% to 9.5%, as previously mentioned, due to the impact of Verizon’s nationwide 5G launch and use of dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS).
Upload speeds
Finally, Opensignal also looked at 5G upload speeds. Upload speeds impact the sharing of photos, videos and other large files. Again, the winner was T-Mobile with an upload speed of 14.0 Mbps; Verizon followed at 11.9 Mbps; and AT&T users got 8.0 Mbps.
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Until 5G network growing pains are over, the trends of ongoing performance degradation and increasing customer dissatisfaction are likely to continue, creating the impression that 5G is failing to live up to the hype.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
