Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Testing Real 5G: Part 2!”.
Hey, what’s up guys mkbhd here and let’s talk about 5g again we got some updates, so you might remember that 5g explain video. We did a couple months ago that really blew up. We had a ton of fun making it, but naturally, as you might imagine, there are a bunch of follow-up questions about roll out. You see, how can you cover an entire city or an entire country for that matter, a whole planet in 5g, if a millimeter wave tower can only cover half a city block? Well, the answer is: there’s going to be different ways to build out 5g.
Some may describe it as a race to 5g. I would agree with dieter from the verge: it’s not really a race, because there isn’t really a finish line. You just kind of keep getting better over time, but also then there’s this headline about t-mobile getting a head start launching 5g across the us all at once, but nobody can use it until december 6th. Well, that’s not completely true, not nobody. So i was out in la a couple days ago specifically to test t-mobile’s new 600 megahertz 5g network. So here are my thoughts, so i could have gone to any number of places, but the weather is way nicer right now in la for shooting outdoors. So shout out to t-mobile for allowing me to do some exclusive testing, for you guys and thanks to oneplus, for setting up this video and providing the compatible 5g phone and then shout out to john from tld for helping me do a little testing and to shoot This video okay, so there are going to be two phones that launch on t-mobile to take advantage of this 5g network oneplus 7t, pro 5g mclaren edition and samsung galaxy note: 10 plus 5g. Of course, i’m going to choose the slightly faster of the two phones to stick with the theme of this video plus. It means there’s a good excuse to involve another mclaren supercar.
So this is testing 5g part. 2.. Okay, so i want you to check out this clip cut out from a t-mobile 5g hype. Video it’s working, it’s working nationwide 5g is live okay, so that was incredibly corny, but the point that they’re trying to make is they’re, basically lighting up 5g for 200 million people all at once on day one.
So there are no like special 5g cities that are popping up. There are no city blocks that are doing it and the reason they’re able to show this map and make that claim is low band 5g. So you might remember when i was talking about verizon 5g in that first video we had to go all the way to a specific 5g city and then find a tower for that 5g area and then test 5g on, like that one square block where it was Working and there have been stories about nfl games where they’re trying to light up 5g in the stadium for fans that day and they couldn’t even cover the whole stadium with 5g that is millimeter wave and basically, what we found through our testing and i’ll link that Video below the like button in case you haven’t seen it already, but basically what we found is those waves do not travel very well and they don’t go through objects at all. So you get incredible speeds, but not very far away from the tower, but, as many of you rightly pointed out, not all 5g is millimeter wave, so the t-mobile plan, as they’ve explained it is they want to start with low band 5g, which is anything under that.
One gigahertz frequency and then use their merger with sprint to fill in more areas with mid band 5g and then at the end, fill in the gaps with millimeter wave so they’re, starting at the bottom and working their way up. Instead of what verizon’s done, which is start with millimeter wave, so here we are in sunny la casually driving around a 2020 mclaren gt with a mclaren edition, oneplus 7t pro 5g and you just have 5g everywhere. So what do you get from low band 5g? Well, the main advantage is low band can cover miles from a single cell tower. I know this because we drove around miles from this cell tower to try to test this and sure enough. It stayed locked to 5g the entire time we drove 5 10 15 minutes away still 5g behind buildings under trees.
It bounced effortlessly between a very small number of towers as we drove so what’s the trade-off. Well, low and mid-bands won’t get you. Those sexy thousand megabits per second download speeds, like you, might have, if you’re standing right next to a millimeter wave tower, but instead you’ll see somewhere between 20 to 50 percent, faster speeds than good 4g, and most of my tests were getting me anywhere between 40 to 140 megabits per second download speeds and then somewhere from like 30 to 60 megabit up speeds, which for me is right in line with the best 4g speeds, i’ve ever gotten once or twice in my life, but now it’s everywhere.
So if i’m gon na get 5g 65 65, that would be incredible for me for lte. So that’s good! It’S 25. 26. 27.
28 up, oh up! Okay! 33 up 36! That’S really good! Like i mentioned earlier, i’m using the mclaren edition oneplus 7t pro 5g, and it looks exactly like the mclaren edition, oneplus 7t pro that i have just with new 5g radios inside all the same specs high refresh rate snapdragon, 855 plus 12 gigs of ram and the 4085 milliamp hour battery they’re all still the same here, so i left the fancy alcantara case on the 5g one just so i wouldn’t get them mixed up and i found the battery seemed to diminish about the same rate as 4g, but i still got to take Advantage of those noticeably better speeds when doing things like watching videos or downloading a really large high quality, spotify playlist, it’s not the snap of a finger that you might want it to be with millimeter wave, but it’s still much faster than 4g and anytime. I start to get comfortable with these speeds, like they weren’t that great. I just did a side-by-side test with my phone, which is on att 4g, and the difference was definitely real, so that is the main advantage to starting a 5g rollout with the lower and mid bands. You don’t get the crazy headline making speeds that might be better for pr, but on the other hand you do get the advantage more than half a block away from the tower, and so, unlike having just millimeter wave, you will have everyone who buys a 5g device Affected pretty much on day one, instead of having to be in a certain pocket of a certain town, yeah, faster speaking of faster, the car, we’re driving, definitely faster than most cars matter. Of fact, i think mclaren knew exactly what they were doing when they decided to lend me a red and black car. So you know what, while i’m not going to review this car, i figure i might as well walk you through some of the quirks and features that i’ve noticed.
This is the 2020 mclaren gt, so we’ve messed with other mclaren cars before in the past. This is their newest, most creature, comfort, full version of a gt card stands for grand tour, which means there’s a lot of things that make it easier to drive on the daily. But there’s still a lot of weird interesting things about this car, so today i’ll be taking a look at some of its quirks and features. So if you start anywhere on a supercar, you have to start with where you get in and a lot of prototype cars recently, you sort of see that there’s no door handle and it’s perfectly smooth – and that is the case with the gt.
But there is a way to get in. You can see on the back of the door, there’s a little cutout and that’s actually the door handle so to get in you. Push in and it’ll roll the frameless window down a bit and unlock it and that’s how you can swing the door open and get inside your mclaren and then you’ll also notice for a daily driver-focused car with nice leather seats and tons of extra space. There’S still not a ton of interior space, in fact, there is no glovebox in this car. So as a passenger, your only options for storage are this small smartphone size net in the footwell near your feet, or these little cubbies on the inside of each door. That fold down, so you can fit anything in them.
That’S i guess a water bottle size or less, but speaking of storage space, one place you will find a lot more of. It is in the front trunk of the mclaren gt and there are three ways to open the front trunk of this car. You can press the front trunk button on the key or on the left side of the steering wheel. You can find a button with the same image press that and it’ll open the front trunk from the inside of the car or, if you’re outside the car, you can get out and there’s actually another identical button on the door only visible when the door is open. So there’s no way you forget, you have a front trunk and the front itself, as you can see when it’s open is actually quite big, bigger in fact than the tesla model s and i fit a suitcase full of video gear in there just fine uh, not That i use video gear um, you could even fit more if you wanted to this car also has uh something extremely rare for a supercar with a 200 plus mile an hour top speed and that’s a power, rear, lift gate and a ton of extra trunk storage. Where you could theoretically store an entire bag of 18 golf clubs no kidding, but my favorite gizmo in the mclaren gt has to be the sunroof, the electrochromatic adjustment, so right below the glass roof. Here there are some buttons. Basically, a touch screen that lets you actively adjust the level of tint on the sunroof.
So if the sun is really beating down during the peak of the day, you can add tint or if you want to see more, you can turn it down. Super quick and super impressive, so now, of course i should drive it sorry. I got off track there uh this isn’t autofocus, but i’ll leave the real doug demiro video on the mclaren gt that he already did below check that out. But anyway, there you have it that is low and mid band 5g.
In a nutshell. So really it turns out one of the most interesting parts about 5g is the rollout and you know, there’s no right or wrong answer, but which rollout strategy is better. The verizon way right now, which is doing millimeter wave in these hyper local tiny areas and getting those sexy headline, making speeds and then doing mid band later or the t-mobile way, which is flipping.
The switch on low and mid band first and covering as many people as possible getting everyone, those bumps and speeds and seeing the nice advantage, but not making the headlines and filling in the gaps with millimeter wave later. Let me know what you think. I’M definitely curious. Also, mclaren and oneplus are having a contest that i’ll link the details to below where you can win the 5g phone and a sort of mclaren driving experience kind of similar to what i just had, which was a lot of fun. So if you want to check that out, that’s below as well either way thank you for watching and i’ll catch you guys in the next one peace. .