From PC Mag: AT&T supposedly launched its millimeter-wave, 5G network with a Netgear 5G hotspot in December 2018. But any independent confirmation that real people are using that network has been hard to come by. Now the company has identified one customer and says it's doing better on speeds than before.
AT&T now claims that its 5G hotspots "have experienced speeds in the range of 200-300 megabits per second—and even as high as 400 megabits per second ... [but that] does not represent average speeds. Speeds vary and may be lower."
Let me unwind this a touch. AT&T has an average of 375MHz of millimeter-wave spectrum in most cities. With 2x2 MIMO antennas, that should come out to speeds around 2Gbps, give or take. That would open up a considerable difference between AT&T's 4G "5G E" network and real 5G. Ookla Speedtest Intelligence currently says AT&T's average download speed in Chicago, a 5G E city, is 38.86Mbps and its top-10 percent download speed is 89.34Mbps.
But there's currently some aspect of AT&T's network that's preventing the company from using more than a single 100MHz carrier, making its speeds max out at 625Mbps—lower than the current theoretical maximum of AT&T's 4G network, especially in places like downtown Chicago, where the 4G network is enhanced with 5GHz Licensed Assisted Access (LAA). (We got 537Mbps on that network about a year ago.)
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