5G Australia has seen a marketing blitz recently with offers of special 5G plans and new phones that take advantage of this next generation network standard.
Telstra’s 5G network has been rolled out in Australia in some cities but currently there are only three 5G compatible phones available on the market that can access the 5G network. They are the LGV50, Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and the Oppo Reno 5G.
At present, 5G is only available in 10 cities and towns across Australia: Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Canberra, Hobart, Launceston, the Gold Coast and Toowoomba. Even in towns where it is available, however, it only works in certain areas because new cell towers have not been widely rolled out as yet. Most cities only have pockets of coverage and Telstra says will be at least four to five years before 5G is as widely available as the 4G network is presently. This means that even if you have a 5G mobile, you’ll probably have trouble finding a location with a 5G signal.
Once you do get a 5G signal, however, the download speeds you can expect are lightning fast. In Brisbane for example one test achieved download speeds of 681Mbps. At that rate a 2Gb movie would only take 25 seconds to download. While you may not be able to get those speeds consistently it shows what the promise of the new standard.
The Australian government has announced that it will soon be auctioning off a new range of frequencies and this will enable provider to ram up speeds even more to potentially ten times faster than the current 4G network.
There will be some variation in the speed a given user sees because 5G works best when a phone is in line of sight of a tower and the speed can also be reduced when there is network congestion such as in densely populated areas or at busy times of the day. With the progressive installation of towers for the new standard this is expected to improve, however.
5G Australia is still very much an early adopter technology and confined to specific locations. At this stage the 4G network is still a better bet in terms of network coverage. 5G will come into its own in the future as autonomous cars, connected cities and Internet of Things applications become more commonplace. In a few years 5G will be faster and available in more areas.
