5G Mobile Coverage - Progress and Concerns

An interesting new product being promoted by Telstra:
https://www.telstra.com.au/internet/mobile-broadband/htc-5g-hub
All bright, shiny and new, but check out the connections. No antenna port.

Given the difficulty 5G frequencies have penetrating walls - and the fact that the hub will generally be inside a building, Telstra seems to assume that every building will have an external antenna and internal transmitter(s). Without that, would the hub work well - or at all?

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Perhaps a micro-cell product but they don’t want customers to know it yet? Buy one and discover its ‘beauties’ so Telstra can respond by offering a $$$$ antenna kit or 5G amplifier.

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Fortunately it also can connect to the more mundane 4G-X.

Given Telstra has a very limited 5G area for use, that is also a great feature!

P.S.
Telstra’s everyday 4G wireless modems typically do not provide external antenna connections either. You need to insist if you require that feature. There is at least one portable model that has a dual antenna connection. Works best next to the window when indoors.

I’ve edited the title of this thread to broaden its scope. For 5G, Telstra looks like the one to watch.

So 5G is referenced purely for marketing purposes? Got it!

5G differs from 4GX in that the frequencies employed for the higher speeds are readily disrupted (by masonry, moisture or vegetation, for example). There are many places where Telstra 4G also doesn’t work without an external antenna or signal booster.

An acquaintance reports asking about the HTC 5G hub in a Telstra store, only to be told that they wouldn’t give him any information or let him see one unless he committed to buy first. The information’s on the web sites of both Telstra and HTC, so something weird is going on.

Meanwhile:

That Telstra has priced 160GB of monthly downloads as its best offer is an eloquent statement about how it thinks 5G will be used, presumably to access a LOT of data.

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That sounds incredibly dodgy - the kind of thing you would expect from these guys.

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Sounds like a case of poorly trained employees to me. You’d be surprised how some salespeople don’t know basic information available on their website. Said employee probably didn’t want to go through the pain of asking someone else unless they knew they were getting a sale

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Agree. Totally my experience with 4GX and Telstra. At home I need to put the Telstra device in one of two windows to hit 2 bars and a reliable service at speeds not much better than 3G. Away it can be very good. Video streaming and email. Buildings, forest etc still seem to impact 4G in some locations, hence the option for an antenna is important.
I’d suggest Telstra 4GX is in the same ball park performance as Optus 4G LTE (Plus), although that I access with an iPhone 8 which has no external antenna option.

For anyone lucky enough to live close to a Telstra 5G micro cell better news perhaps.
But $129 for the 160GB you noted it looks not so sweet. That’s also less than 5hrs of data at 100Mbps data rate. Which is much less than 5G is capable of. It is one big premium to save milliseconds on down loading the email?

More cute than sweet on Telstra’s behalf given Optus will do 100GB for $60pm on sim only, or 200GB for $65pm on fixed mobile data on a contract and throw in the 4G Plus modem.

There is also an Optus plan for 500GB, only $85pm.

Yes you need to live in an area with reliable Optus coverage and accept likely limitations at peak times. For a casual user a little data can go a long way!

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For 5G, the HTC 5G Hub uses only 5G NR Band n78. That’s 3.5 GHz. The same part of the spectrum is used for NBN fixed wireless. It will be interesting to see how 5G coexists with fixed wireless.

Experience with fixed wireless is that 3.5GHz signals need line of sight between transmitter and receiver. If the transmitter is close enough to the receiver, then it might be able to put out a signal strong enough to punch through limited obstructions. That would be expensive in power and running costs.

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25 posts were merged into an existing topic: Studies Still Confirm Mobile Phones Do Not Cause Cancer

My wife and I received text messages from Telstra over the past week advising that there might be some mobile phone service disruptions as they were upgrading their network in various areas around Cairns.

Around a year ago, Telstra installed a large tower next to the Mt Sheridan Shopping Centre but our 3G/4G coverage did not improve.

Some weeks ago, a crew with a very high reach bucket truck were carrying out some work on the base station antennas, and the current Telstra 5G coverage map shows that the base station is obviously for 5G, and Cairns is one of some 8 areas in Qld where Telstra 5G is already operating.

https://www.telstra.com.au/5g#cairns

What a contrast to Optus’ joke of a network where 5G is only operating in or near the Capital Cities as they cherry pick the market as usual.

https://www.optus.com.au/for-you/5g#5g-mobile-coverage

Absolutely pathetic.

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It’s one of the ways in which the private sector reliably fails. A very good reason why some things are best left to the public sector.

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Hey Fred123, if you think that is bad, I live a stones throw from you, up behind the school on Anderson Road. Even though we are these days considered “inner” suburbs of Cairns, I have had next to no mobile coverage for five years, unless I go outside and stand in the middle of the street.
Argued with Telstra for years over it, but got nowhere, so now just live with it.
But somehow, I don’t think the 5G will make any difference to me, and seriously doubt reception will ever improve.
Back in the day before various governments decided a good idea was to sell off our public utilities and privatise them, I believe we actually got better service, and problems were fixed as quickly as possible. Not to mention all those various public utilities services were a heck of a lot cheaper too.
Ah the price of “progress” in a “civilised world” eh? :rofl:

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Welcome to the forum @TropicRock, on the flip side I ordered a landline to a new house from the PMG in 1971, Southport Qld, in a centrally located developed estate, not near the perimeter of the built up area as then defined, and was quoted a 2 year installation wait. I moved on before the line was installed.

That was probably as quickly as they could considering funding for developing the infrastructure at the time was essentially rationed.

I remember ringing my family back in the USA (1970’s) where we booked a call at the post office paying cash, few had landlines, and attended a designated pay phone at the requisite time; an operator would ring the phone booth and connect the call. $15 for 3 minutes from memory. A good annual income at the time was about $3~4,000 for perspective.

I am in an outer suburb of Melbourne. My Telstra network SIM usually has service in half my house; my Optus network SIM sometimes has service in the other half; neither always has service where I am sitting as I type, but I do get missed call messages. To make an intelligible call I need to do one or more of walk around the house, go onto the veranda, or walk into the back garden. I am about 1 km from the tower apparently shaded by a typical area hill. I feel your pain. I am also generally cynical about the wonders of the pervasive online world being a panacea.

Even in the USA my travels span areas including the populous east with dodgy mobile service and network responses that are unusable.

I support that assertion in the general case.

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The clowns at Optus are now claiming to have Australia’s fastest 5G mobile network so I checked their 5G coverage maps.

No service in Qld anywhere outside the BrisVegas region.

Meanwhile, Telstra shows service in almost every city in Qld.

Lot of use mouthing off that your 3rd rate network is the fastest when it covers next to nothing.

Typical Optus misleading and deceptive conduct.

image

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They may still be correct if they provide the fastest 5G in at least 1 place in Australia. It is Puffery and may even hold that grain of truth if it has one place where it beats all other Telcos. Highest Speed and Greatest Coverage do not always go together

Carefully used wording
you know I don’t agree with puffery but the legality of it is that it can be lawfully used.

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Coverage and speed are two different issues. It would be quite possible for a very small regional carrier to have the fastest 5G - within the small town that can access its services.

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But it is highly unlikely that they would be spruiking the fact on a grand scale, unlike Optus who obviously want to try to create a false impression.

They have always played second fiddle or third fiddle to Telstra and always will.

From when they first rolled out their pathetic GSM network in the 1990’s, they made it clear that they were really only interested in the high profit metro areas and any regional coverage was merely to put a dot on a national coverage map to try to impress metro users, and to let regional users find out the hard way just what a joke their regional coverage was.

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Progress by Optus and Telstra in rolling out 5G continues. The 850MHz and 900MHz bands originally allocated for 3G have been resold for 5G use from 2024.

This marks a definite end to 3G mobile. Regional and rural customers not in major centres will retain the existing options of 4G on the Telstra or Optus networks.

What benefits will 5G bring if any to these consumers?

Aside from the marketing spin, is the only real benefit one that benefits principally the telcos? IE the capability of provide more concurrent connections by repurposing current equipment.

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For rural and regional areas -

A more realistic 5G deployment for rural areas (when it eventually happens) will be with transmission in long-range, low-bandwidth frequencies or what are known as the low and mid bands (600 MHz to 900 MHz and 2.5 GHz to 4.2 GHz, respectively). (source)

Hence the reasons for repurposing the 3G bandwidths.

What’s happened to the rollout Optus hasn’t yet installed 5G in my area?