Understanding 5G performance for real-world services: a content provider's perspective

5G has seen rapid growth recently, attracting several measurement studies on its coverage, connectivity and quality of service. However, there is still a lack of understanding of 5G's capabilities and potential impacts from a content provider (CP)'s perspective. This paper fills in this gap by studying 5G networks used by over 23 million users in one year in Kuaishou, a popular crowdsourced live streaming platform. Our measurements provide the following discoveries. i) Standalone (SA) 5G generally provides end-to-end performance improvement as compared with 4G or non-SA (NSA) 5G, but its advantage depends on both the number of cellular users and CP-level configurations. ii) In the radio access network, SA 5G is more sensitive to access density but has better handover tolerance. iii) Controlled experiments with 29 mobile device models on energy consumption refute some "conventional wisdom," including that 5G always consumes more power. iv) Traceroute-based active experiments in over 300 cities show that although users are "closer" to the internet in SA 5G, their end-to-end latency may not benefit from that. Furthermore, we show new design space for 5G participants and provide a 5G-aware rebuffer strategy tested by 9 million viewers in Kuaishou, with a 7% reduction in rebuffer proportion.