I have more issues with the fact that I have no usable signal on 1/3 of my commute (closer to 2/3 unusable tuesday-wednesday!) than issues with peak speed.
The R&D money would be better spent laying fibre to phone masts. I suspect it will be spent on dividends instead though ☹️
Edit: unless more research is required to increase users/mast? It’s fine in cities, so I’m assuming it more a bandwidth to the mast issue?
My friend, most base stations got fiber backhaul before 5G even existed. We are well beyond that problem.
In fact, it is not uncommon in 2025 to have fiber fronthaul from the remote radio (at the mast) back to the “cloud” where the actual base station is virtualized and/or software-defined (at the data center).
The usable signal issue is a whole other complex can of electromagnetic worms and in contemporary times is a side effect of how 5G NR is sort of “bolted on” to 4G LTE. It is not dissimilar to the growing pains that mixed 3G/4G networks had.
Do you know what the signal bar on a phone actually represents? My commute has quite a few areas with good (full or almost full) ‘signal’ but with the no internet exclamation mark.
That’s why I have assumed it’s a bandwidth to the mast problem.
Ultimately, phone networks are not built to cope with commuter trains ☹️
Do you know what the signal bar on a phone actually represents?
Thoughts and prayers. It will even lie about the technology in use (e.g. it may display “5G” while connected to a “4G LTE” cell if that cell supports 5G EN-DC, regardless of if the feature is actually in use).
Cities probably have a higher density of towers, or the towers in cities have more capable antennas. Point-to-point microwave links can be pretty damn fast and reliable. They have their limitations, but even low-end systems like some of Ubiquiti’s 60ghz stuff can form full duplex 5Gbps links at 10+ kilometers. Fiber is still king, but I’m guessing the backhaul isn’t the issue.
I’m guessing that the issue is congestion on the client radios. 5g is supposed to be much better at dealing with this thanks to time sharing improvements, but it seems likely that there just aren’t enough towers. One scenario that seems reasonable is that your telco (incorrectly) assumed that they wouldn’t need as many towers when upgrading, so they only upgraded a subset of their towers and removed old ones once 4g was deprecated.
edit: you might be able to get better information about wtf is going on by using a community-sourced site like https://cellmapper.net/
I believe you can use that site to get info about how many towers there are and what the client-side congestion is like.
EDIT: ew, cellmapper is closed source. OpenCellid or beaconDB seem to be open source equivalents.
I have more issues with the fact that I have no usable signal on 1/3 of my commute (closer to 2/3 unusable tuesday-wednesday!) than issues with peak speed.
The R&D money would be better spent laying fibre to phone masts. I suspect it will be spent on dividends instead though ☹️
Edit: unless more research is required to increase users/mast? It’s fine in cities, so I’m assuming it more a bandwidth to the mast issue?
My friend, most base stations got fiber backhaul before 5G even existed. We are well beyond that problem.
In fact, it is not uncommon in 2025 to have fiber fronthaul from the remote radio (at the mast) back to the “cloud” where the actual base station is virtualized and/or software-defined (at the data center).
The usable signal issue is a whole other complex can of electromagnetic worms and in contemporary times is a side effect of how 5G NR is sort of “bolted on” to 4G LTE. It is not dissimilar to the growing pains that mixed 3G/4G networks had.
Do you know what the signal bar on a phone actually represents? My commute has quite a few areas with good (full or almost full) ‘signal’ but with the no internet exclamation mark.
That’s why I have assumed it’s a bandwidth to the mast problem.
Ultimately, phone networks are not built to cope with commuter trains ☹️
Thoughts and prayers. It will even lie about the technology in use (e.g. it may display “5G” while connected to a “4G LTE” cell if that cell supports 5G EN-DC, regardless of if the feature is actually in use).
Cities probably have a higher density of towers, or the towers in cities have more capable antennas. Point-to-point microwave links can be pretty damn fast and reliable. They have their limitations, but even low-end systems like some of Ubiquiti’s 60ghz stuff can form full duplex 5Gbps links at 10+ kilometers. Fiber is still king, but I’m guessing the backhaul isn’t the issue.
I’m guessing that the issue is congestion on the client radios. 5g is supposed to be much better at dealing with this thanks to time sharing improvements, but it seems likely that there just aren’t enough towers. One scenario that seems reasonable is that your telco (incorrectly) assumed that they wouldn’t need as many towers when upgrading, so they only upgraded a subset of their towers and removed old ones once 4g was deprecated.
edit: you might be able to get better information about wtf is going on by using a community-sourced site like https://cellmapper.net/
I believe you can use that site to get info about how many towers there are and what the client-side congestion is like.
EDIT: ew, cellmapper is closed source. OpenCellid or beaconDB seem to be open source equivalents.
That’s a cool resource. Ty