this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Gadgets
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Gadget (noun): a small mechanical / electrical device or tool, especially an ingenious or novel one.
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I travel a lot. Multiple states. 125k miles a year. I am on a budget carrier. Cellphone speeds only seem, to me, to be slowing in areas with heavy tower traffic. Makes sense. More people with phones than ever. More data intensive games and social media being consumed on all of them. Towers not being built or upgraded as fast as they could be. And of course, the budget carriers do get pushed to the back when congestion is up. The best place to watch netflicks on your phone is out in BFE by yourself. A tower with low traffic never slows down. You can also notice service differences by day of the week. Sunday evening, when everyone is home instead of bar hopping and eating out is the worst time to be online as far as service quality goes.
Network congestion is indeed a likely cause. Many blame 5G but it uses the exact same frequencies as 4G, and also some more, notably for short range communication, say up to a few hundred feet.
So most of the time 4G and 5G don't make a difference, you'll notice the same improvements or worsening which can have a myriad of reasons.
There seems to be an utter lack of enough investment in more bandwidth and throughput in the backbone infrastructure.
Slapping a 5G sticker on a product is not much more than marketing in many use cases. 5G shines in highly urbanised areas, IF they build out better infrastructure that is.