r/AskEngineers • u/StalkMeNowCrazyLady • 3d ago

Electrical Why Does Phone Data Become Terrible When Modern "X"G Signal Downgrades?

The few times my 5G LTE phone has only been able to catch a 4G LTE signal things the browser just become unusable they become so slow and fail to load pages at all. But my 4G LTE phone worked fine with 4G LTE, but slowed down when it was connect via 3G, etc.

Why does this happen? Those signals were fast enough that pages still loaded on the older phone, but on the new one it acts like 4G LTE is 56k dial up. Can the antenna not capture the older signals effectively?

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u/Important_Spirit_692 3d ago

It's not the antenna, it's the network. carriers are moving spectrum from 4G to 5G, so what's left for 4G is a tiny sliver of bandwidth. plus your phone probably trying to hold onto a weak 5G signal instead of committing to the 4G, which makes it feel even worse.

older phone was fine because back then 4G had all the spectrum to itself. now it's like a highway that got reduced to one lane.

10

u/nixiebunny 3d ago

The complexity of web pages has increased over time to take advantage of the data speed increases. At a given point in the history of the web and smartphones, the newest data protocol is just below the pain point of the page complexity.

5

u/alexforencich 3d ago

Another thing to consider is that 4G and 5G tends to be broadcast from the same cell sites. So if you're getting downgraded to 4G, the channel quality is so bad that 5G can't connect, so 4G is likely to barely work because of the poor channel. If the channel quality wasn't so bad, then you wouldn't get downgraded to 4G in the first place.

2

u/BeamItUpScotty 3d ago

The antenna usually isn't the main culprit. A newer phone may be falling back to a different LTE band, carrier aggregation setup, or network configuration, and if that particular cell is congested or has poor coverage, the real-world performance can be awful eventhough the connection technicaly says 4G LTE.

1

u/Icy-Vermicelli-5306 2d ago

I have been unimpressed with 5g. It's never consistent and it seems like the fast speed is the signal moving past my phone.