A Close Look at 5G in the Wild: Unrealized Potentials and Implications

This paper reports our in-depth measurement study of 5G experience with three US operators (AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile). We not only quantitively characterize 5G coverage, availability and performance (over both mmWave and Sub-6GHz bands), but also identify several performance issues and analyze their root causes. We see that real 5G experience is not that satisfactory as anticipated. It is mainly because faster 5G is not used as it can and should. We have several surprising findings: Despite huge speed potentials (say, up to several hundreds of Mbps), more than half are not realized in practice; Such under-utilization is mainly stemmed from current practice and policies that manage radio resource in a performance-oblivious manner; 5G is even less used where 5G is co-deployed over both mmWave and Sub-6GHz bands; Transiently missing 5G is not uncommon and its negative impacts last much longer. Inspired by our findings, we design a patch solution called 5GBoost to fix the problems identified in legacy 5G operations. Our preliminary evaluation validates its effectiveness to realize more 5G potentials.