Over the previous six months, the media has been awash with stories about 5G being a huge disappointment.
Supposedly, people expected 5G to be faster, and many smartphone users are experiencing signal dropouts on 5G, or being forced to use 4G, due to network congestion.
Here at Green Smartphones, we performed research in collaboration with OnePoll to find out what people in the UK really think about 5G. Has the 5G rollout been a huge disappointment, or is the technology meeting expectations?
Survey results
We surveyed 1000 UK adults who reported using 5G to get online on their mobile phone. According to our research:
- 80% of people are satisfied with the speeds and coverage offered by their 5G service.
- Only 9% of people are dissatisfied, while a further 12% are neither satisfied nor dissatisfied.
- 33% of people said that 5G is faster than they expected.
- Only 14% of people said that 5G is slower than they expected, while 53% of people thought that their 5G speeds were about as fast as they expected.
In summary, the overwhelming majority of UK adults are satisfied with the performance of 5G. Very few people say that their 5G service is slower than they expected.
Is 5G truly disappointing?
Our analysis revealed that reports of consumers being disappointed by 5G are vastly overblown, at least in the UK.
While 5G may seem overhyped in the eyes of industry professionals and the media, most 5G users feel that the technology is performing about as expected, or better than expected.
This may be in part because in industry circles, 5G was marketed as a significant IoT enabler, and to date, this hasn’t been the case. But the majority of people are satisfied with the speeds and coverage offered by their 5G phone plans.
5G has not enabled doctors to perform remote surgery anywhere in the world, nor has it made fixed-line broadband obsolete. However, it has made it possible for many people to get faster internet speeds at home in many different countries, where sufficient 5G network infrastructure investments have been made.
In our opinion, disappointment with 5G services is overblown. On the whole, people are happy with the speeds and coverage they are receiving with 5G, and are willing to pay more for the service.