Looking at future considerations for switching FTTC>5g

I am currently with EE and at home (outer london) can get 140mb down and 45mb up on my S8+ and pings of 15ms (around 9am, need to try some tests at peak time tonight). I will likely grab an S11+ in March (and wonder whether I might get even faster speeds maybe due to extra CA, considering the S8 is now 3 years old?).

EE checker shows there is 5g spreading out from london but stopping just before it gets to me at the moment but hopefully that will not be too far away. I am considering options for both my phone and switching my FTTC over to 5g when I get coverage (possibly even 4g considering I only get 50mb on FTTC which is costing almost double what I pay EE). Voda and o2 checkers seem to show no 5g anywhere near me. I was very surprised by the extent of the coverage on EE's checker, it seems to show a good 60% coverage for 5g inside the M25 where voda and o2 just have the odd few random dots. Either EE have rolled out 5g much faster or their checker is greatly exaggerating the coverage!

Clearly Three have the best of the 5g spectrum so far but with another big auction in 2020 the likes of EE might erase that advantage if they get a good chunk of it. With EE seemingly having the best backhaul (I am guessing related to being owned by BT which owns openreach which owns most of the fibre infrastructure/backhaul), I am not convinced that Three would even be able to take proper advantage of the nice 100mhz chunk they currently have even if EE do not get any more spectrum at all.

Then there is the action next year where different spectrum is going to be better/worse at going through walls etc so its probably going to be very hard to judge it even if they all end up with the same mhz of spectrum since some of it will be faster and some will be better at going through obstructions. So that might change things after the auction in Spring (although once the auction is done I am not sure how long it will take them to actually start using that new spectrum, is it something they could turn on using existing masts quite quickly or does it need new masts/software updates to handle it?).

Then there's the fact that EE currently has extortionate pricing (4g unlimited is £34 and 5g is £44 while 3 can be had on equivalent 12 month terms for just £20 including 5g!) so unless EE does show a very significant advantage in both coverage (which it current seems to) and speed (too early to tell) or slashes their pricing, it simply won't be worth it.

I don't necessarily need to switch the home broadband to the same provider, I want the best I can get at home, but I really don't need 500mb+ speeds on a phone, just the most reliable coverage instead.

Just interested in what others are thinking and whether I have missed something in my calculations here. I plan on looking at all this again in March when I get a new phone and by then will hopefully have some 5g coverage. Obviously still a lot of unknowns at the moment but I am trying to figure out as much as I can in advance so I know what to be looking for. Once I have tested it with my new phone I will decide what to do with the home broadband.

In reply to a post by Ewok:

Just interested in what others are thinking and whether I have missed something in my calculations here

Despite all of Three's proclamations they haven't actually launched 5G yet for handsets. They bought another network called Relish and are selling this as 5G home broadband, in very specific areas.

Rootmetrics did a comparison recently of coverage:
https://jmcomms.com/2019/11/19/ee-adds-14-towns-and-...

However if EE are getting benefits from being part of the BT plc group, then Ofcom and the competition commission would hit them very hard, as Openreach is now "structurally separate".

My personal take is that 5G is bleeding edge technology, it is changing fast, and both EE and Vodafone are going as fast as they can. There are only a limited number of trained network planners on this new tech.

Don't forget that the current 5G deployed is only 1st generation, and requires signal 4G to operate. This is known as New Radio, Non Stand-Alone (NR NSA). There is a lot of talk in the UK and USA about the 5G symbol showing on the handset when you are actually in 4G coverage, but 5G is coming from the same mast (although your handset isn't necessarily picking it up due to obstructions). (Not to be confused with the AT&T stupidity of 5Ge).

During 2020 we will see a lot of expansion, and hopefully the start of mmWave transmissions, which will increase capacity by a large amount in open areas (e.g. shopping centres, London railway stations etc).

To get the best speeds from 5G broadband, you will almost certainly need an external antenna on your building.

New 5G chipsets are expected from the usual parties (Qualcomm and others) and it will be interesting to see if the S11 makes use of these, or if it is too early in the cycle.

5g showing up when you only have 4g connectivity sounds like a pretty big and pretty stupid problem to me! That is the sort of thing that would absolutely drive me mad. I hope that is not still around come the S11!

Yeah I am hoping the S11 has a new 5g chipset so I get some sort of future proofing to last me a couple of years. Although as usual it will be Samsungs own exynos version in the UK not qualcomm (which will be the last version before Samsung ditches its own SoC manufacturer, so 2021 will probably be qualcomm worldwide in Samsungs). Samsung flagships are usually about the first to have the new gen chips each year.

I could grab a 4g modem and just use that for now but it feels like a bit of a waste at this point buying old tech that is in no way future proofed and will soon be obsolete (in theory). Plus to get the best price I would need a 12 month contract and I wouldn't want to be stuck with it for 12 months if another provider then has a good 5g signal here, so probably best just wait a few months and look at 5g modems (I would want a mmWave capable one for future proofing as much as possible, I am next to a big open area).