5G Speeds Aren’t Super Fast (Yet)

5G still has infrastructure problems. Headlines like to talk about 5G towers going up, but in reality, only a few towers have been upgraded to support 5G, primarily in urban areas. And those hardware upgrades are only adding bits and pieces of 5G support at a time. This allows carriers to advertise that they have 5G and make claims about hypothetical 5G speeds, but on the ground, users probably aren’t seeing much of a difference from their previous LTE performance. The good news is that’s slowly changing. As more advanced 5G tech gets added to cell towers, we’re starting to see big upgrades (Verizon and T-Mobile are doing the best at this so far). But it’s a process, and that process won’t be completed for major carriers until well after the iPhone 14 in many cases. That’s especially true if you don’t live in a big city, in which case you may never encounter 5G for years, or you’ll find plenty of spots when your phone automatically drops back to 4G LTE because 5G isn’t currently available.