Home > News

AT&T 5G Service Tests Slower than 4G

By Laura Tucker
News 5g Att Featured

5G has been long awaited. Now that it’s finally beginning to roll out, it seems the speed isn’t what many are hoping for. In particular, the 5G service AT&T is offering at this point is slower than its 4G in 21 out of 22 cities.

Testing 5G Against 4G

PCMag does an annual test of the top mobile networks. It reported that “AT&T 5G right now appears to be essentially worthless,” so if you’re an AT&T customer, you’re probably very disappointed right now.

Not that AT&T was particularly slow, however. The average download speed for AT&T was 103.Mbps, which places it just below that of Verizon but much better than T-Mobile.

This still doesn’t show why 5G is often slower than 4G, though. It’s a result of the way AT&T has used its spectrum to put 5G to use so far.

“AT&T’s 5G slices off a narrow bit of the old 850MHz cellular band and assigns it to 5G to give phones a valid 5G icon without increasing performance. And because of the way current 5G phones work, it often reduces performance,” explained PCMag. With as much time as customers have been waiting for 5G, you would think it was more than just a small section of the old cellular band.

News 5g Att Tower

AT&T’s 4G service gets its speed through the aggregation of channels from different frequencies. As PCMag said, “The most recent phones are able to assemble up to seven of them – that’s called seven-carrier aggregation, and it’s why AT&T won [PCMag’s annual test] last year.”

Analyst Sascha Segan noted 5G phones just can’t handle that aggregation yet. The models tested were the Samsung Galaxy S10 and the Samsung Galaxy S20. These were chosen “because they offer the best 4G and 5G performance available, with the S20 supporting all the different types of 5G US carriers have to offer.”

The 5G phones, however, can’t add as many 4G channels to a 5G channel. If they’re running 5G, they’re not utilizing the 4G channels so that they can run the reduced 5G channel instead. This leads to the slower performance.

Further, PCMag said, “At locations with both 4gG and 5G, our 5G phone was slower than our 4G phone in 21 of 22 cities.” AT&T 5G phones were often accessing only 5MHz of spectrum.

In Baltimore, AT&T boasts speeds of 117.1Mbps. But once 5G is used, it reduces the average download speed by 61 percent throughout the city.

While overall T-Mobile 5G was faster than 4G, in Austin, it had the most 5G availability of the carriers. “It’s 5G results were 17 percent slower than its 4G results at locations where both networks were available.”

News 5g Att Nighttime

AT&T admitted last November that its 5G on the 850MHz band would only offer speeds that are similar to LTE-Advanced. This is just a form of 4G, but AT&T has fooled customers by referring to it as “5GE” or “5G Evolution.”

However, that same 4G service that helped AT&T win top speeds last year is still helping. It allowed an average download speed of 103.1Mbps. T-Mobile’s was a paltry 74Mbps, and Verizon’s topped AT&T slightly with 105.1Mbps. The testers were only able to get an AT&T 5G signal 38 percent of the time, while T-Mobile’s was available 54 percent of the time. Verizon’s, though, was only available a measly four percent of the time.

The 5G Winner

The AT&T 5G and the Verizon 4G continued to duke it out. AT&T won the overall speed title in 12 of 26 cities, while Verizon won 13 cities. T-Mobile only won one city.

Hampering the testing, however, was the coronavirus. PCMag had to adjust its procedures because of the pandemic. Instead of a schedule that involved travel on flights and in rental cars, the magazine hired two dozen drivers to test their own cities.

Without rural testing, it meant the averages are likely higher than what is being reported. This more limited testing found that Verizon’s network is the hardest to find, though the 5G speed “is often mind-blowing.”

This means if you’ve been waiting for 5G to come to your area and to have a phone that runs 5G, it’s really all for naught at this point. The service is still not up to where it needs to be, and it can still be hard to find. And if you have the AT&T 5G service, you’re no better off than when you ran 4G on your phone.

If you are still wanting 5G right now, these are the top 5G phones you can buy today.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.