[richjdsmith]

Has 4G/5G improved? When I lived in the UK (Midlands until 2019) it was entirely unreliable. I'd wager 75% of my connection was on 3G as soon as I was more than 3Km from a town's high street.

I can say with confidence that the shift from 4G/LTE to 5G where I live now in British Columbia (Canada) mountains is not fun. It's significantly less reliable. I understand that its 10x faster, but I'd much prefer reliable over fast when it comes to mobile phones.

[kiwijamo]

I've found LTE to be both faster and more reliable where I'm attached to a tower that provides LTE and UMTS in the same band (e.g. the 2degrees network in New Zealand uses the 900 MHz band for both UMTS and LTE at many of their sites). UMTS has remarkably poor peformance at the cell edge where it at best data connections can only deliver a few kilobits at random intervals whereas LTE provides a reliable and consistent data connection even if it is only 100kbps. I've seen LTE maintain a stable connection at signal levels where GSM would have long since dropped the connection and UMTS would struggle. Makes stuff like emails usable at the far edge of LTE coverage where it's impossible to achieve the same off the UMTS signal from the same tower in the same band. It's so good I hate it when my phone falls back to UMTS in places I know full well LTE service exists. Thankfully all three carries in my country are planning to switch off UMTS in the next two years which will greatly improve service.

[mathieuh]

I live in Northern Ireland, I get 5G pretty much everywhere I've cared to look. I do a lot of cycling and I stream Spotify at max settings and it's never cut out even in the middle of nowhere so I assume I'm getting at least 4G everywhere.

In Belfast I get 115/20 mbps down/up with EE, I think I remember hearing there's something dodgy with whether what your phone shows as 5G is actually 5G but that's easily fast enough for anything I'm likely to be doing from my phone.

I'd say it's been like this for years. Looking at a coverage map it looks like it gets spottier out west where fewer people live though

[pbhjpbhj]

Doesn't Spotify buffer? A few seconds of dropout is fine for playing songs where you can easily buffer a minute or two of data; not so good for a phonecall which ends within those same few seconds without an active connection.

[toast0]

5G (and 4G before it) has more spectrum allocated at higher and lower frequencies. If your carrier has licenses for low frequency and deploys it, it should help a bit with coverage.

[HPsquared]

The 800 MHz band helps a lot to increase coverage, I think. Used to carry analogue TV signals.

[drawfloat]

Recently visited South Yorkshire for the first time in 4 years. I didn’t notice a big difference between 3 and 4G coverage, but it was shocking how much of the city area has complete coverage blackspots. Both for myself connected to EE and a friend connected to Vodafone.

[Engineering-MD]

South Yorkshire can be hilly which may account for black spots. Not a good excuse, but a challenge mobile providers don’t see often enough in the UK to sufficiently account for.

[baz00]

Had no problems anywhere in the UK in recent years on 4G and I've been all over the place.

4G has been incredibly reliable for me. Even on a £10/month SIM only thing, I was up a volcano in the middle of nowhere in Iceland and able to make calls.

[yardstick]

Was your carrier Three/EE? They were terrible.

I found in the UK most carriers 3G was horrid, and 4G actually worked. Vodafone best, second was Three, then O2. Circ early 2020s.

[hedora]

My iPhone 13 mini burns a percent of the battery every few minutes in areas with poor cell reception. That was the first year with 5G support if I remember right. Locking to 4G doesn't seem to make a huge difference. Maybe the new modems don't suck?

It'll last a day or two with good cell reception; longer in airplane mode.

[thecopy]

4G has been rock solid for me since 2010 (I dont use 5G due to battery reasons) - in Sweden/Switzerland

[odiroot]

When I still lived in south Hampshire, I couldn't get any Internet via 4G. 5G barely chugged. Now in Berkshire both 4G and 5G work quite well. I'm on Vodafone network though so YMMV.

[nicoburns]

Whether it matches the 3G coverage you had, I'm not sure. But in general, yes, 4G coverage has improved significantly since 2019.

[physicsguy]

It's considerably better, I live in the East Midlands in a rural village and get 4G and 5G depending on where I am in the house.

[crote]

Ironically 3G is often the reason 4G/5G has poor reception.

1G/2G/3G all need to have a dedicated channel for itself. They were usually given the frequencies with the longest range, which is the 800MHz band. When 4G was introduced it couldn't share that band with 3G, so it was usually given space on higher frequencies around 1800MHz and 2500MHz. Those bands also allow a higher data rate, and anyone out of their range could fall back to 3G so it's a win-win, right?

Buuuuut now we're stuck with 4G in a band with poor reception, and throwing out 3G means losing coverage. Ideally the 4G sites in low-density areas would be moved to 800MHz, but that's going to require significant effort because every single antenna will need to be modified by engineers. Had 4G been deployed to 800MHz initially this wouldn't have been an issue - but that wasn't really possible because it would've meant worse speeds for existing 3G customers.

This whole issue is avoided with 5G because 4G and 5G were explicitly designed to coexist on the same channel.

[cogman10]

All this is true, but there is a bit of nuance. Long range isn't always desirable for wireless communication. Certainly if you are talking about low population areas then it's king. But when you start talking about heavily populated areas the long range becomes a detriment for the network stability. You can end up with cell towers servicing too many people (streaming youtube) which can ultimately overload a node but also cause a lot of signal disruption.

As population density goes up, the higher frequency bandwidths become much more desirable. This is part of the reason why the WiFi standard has been pushing up into 5ghz and 60ghz frequencies. Because you don't want your wifi signal to be yelled over to the neighbor.