In a new analysis, even standard 5G outperforms the Wi-Fi you'll find in most public hotspots, while mmWave 5G trounces home and office wireless networks.
Do you like to game while out and about? You probably use your smartphone, and common sense says you’d find a Wi-Fi network to get the best internet connection and keep the game going. Well, toss that notion out the window if you’ve got a 5G phone and a location with 5G connectivity.
Opensignal collects data(Opens in a new window) from millions of devices globally that run its software. It looked at download and upload speeds across different connection types from tests collected from December 2021 through February 2022, and it used those to quantify what it calls the Game Experience score for each type. Anything with a score of 75 or higher (out of 100) is considered good for gaming.
Only two connection types make it to that level. Home and office Wi-Fi networks at 76.3 is one. It’s the connection most mobile gamers would gravitate toward. But the tests show that if your phone has mmWave 5G, the score jumps up to 81.8.
Obviously, 4G is left in the dust. But it’s interesting to note that even lower-band 5G gets a 74.5. That’s a few points higher than any of the hotspot Wi-Fi connections found at hotels, cafes, stores, and other public places, where network congestion, backhaul speed, and equipment quality are out of your control.
Opensignal performed this same research in 2021(Opens in a new window) and notes that «the overall 5G experience has improved faster than the Wi-Fi experience» in the past year. Last year, it concentrated on download and upload speeds and provided the same info this time. It saw a decrease in the mmWave 5G downloads: It was 640.5Mbps but dropped to 571.6Mbps this year.
But c’mon. That mmWave download speed average obliterates every other wireless connection type. Even standard low-spectrum 5G is 4.8 times faster than a Wi-Fi hotspot. If you’re only downloading files or streaming, it’s looking more and more like 5G will be your connection of choice, once you can get it. This is why both T-Mobile and Verizon can sell a home-based internet service using nothing more than 5G for backhaul.
Also, mmWave 5G outperforms the rest when it comes to upload speed, something you can usually blame on stingy ISPs (if they aren’t fiber-based).
Those numbers are in keeping with the 2021 results, all with a slight improvement. In fact, Wi-Fi’s improvements were the most significant; public Wi-Fi went from 11.2Mbps to 19.5Mbps. But it still wasn’t enough to catch up to mmWave 5G.
Read the full report at Opensignal(Opens in a new window).
For more on gaming internet connections, check out the Best Gaming ISPs for 2022—nothing is going to beat fiber-to-the-home for real gaming for a long time. You can be part of that story by testing your internet connection below. (Turn off your VPN and any streaming video for best results.)
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I’ve been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally for 30 years, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived for the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I then served for a time as managing editor of business coverage for the website, before settling back into the features team for the last decade. I regularly write features on all tech topics, plus I run several special projects including the Readers’ Choice and Business Choice surveys, and yearly coverage of the Fastest ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs.
I started in tech publishing right out of college writing and editing about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was previously on the founding staff of several magazines like Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it’s not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse (and also now dead) as Sony Style, PlayBoy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, Television/Radio. But I minored in Writing so I’d have a future.
In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST («an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale» according to Publishers’ Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.
I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.
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Whatever you throw at me
I use an iPhone XS hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I’m in the market for an Android tablet). I also have a now-ancient Xbox One, a large Asus Chromebook, and several Windows machines including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long because everyone needs friends. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch gaming laptop from Razer attached to an ergonomic Microsoft keyboard and a GPU to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.
I’m most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there, including my novels. But I’m finding the things that make it helpful to writers are found more and more in services like Google Docs using tools like Grammarly. I use Google’s Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can’t live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we’ve switched over entirely to using Infogram.com for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit them.
I’m a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and synch of files; I’m primarily using Dropbox which has never failed me, but also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely heard commercial radio, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon and Google for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I’ve got accounts on all the major social networks to my horror. Even Pinterest, which I don’t understand at all. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house.
My first computer: the Laser 128, an Apple II compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money…until I discovered the Mac SE in the computer room that changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).
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