Yeah in your dreams maybe. I'm often seeing zero bars, asking others if they have any signal only to have them show me a full 5G signal. New towers aren't backwards compatible, and the bandwidth has been largely reduced.
I'm not entirely sure why you're arguing with me about this. 4G currently has much better coverage than 5G; that's just a fact. I'm sure "4G barely works anymore" is true for you, but you don't represent the world, much less India, where this phone is sold.
> New towers aren't backwards compatible, and the bandwidth has been largely reduced.
Yup.
In tech-speak there is 5G NSA (Non-Standalone Architecture) and 5G SA (Standalone Architecture).
5G NSA is a kludge, it is 5G radios operating on a legacy 4G core. Inherently backwards compatible.
5G SA is 5G radios on 5G core. Clearly not backwards compatible.
5G SA is the preferred route for good reason:
1. It delivers reduced power consumption at both operator and user-device level
2. It delivers improved latency and bandwidth at both operator and user-device level
NSA can be rolled out with almost nothing more than a firmware update. For any existing carrier network, it was the obvious place to start 5G rollout.
If you're building new towers, things change, obviously. That said, a lot of industrial/IoT hardware still requires 4G so it's not entirely unreasonable to deploy 4G in new coverage areas.
And it also planned-obsoletes 4G only devices, a big win for the operators that can then sell new 5G capable ones. Such a racket I swear. Can't wait to go through this shit again for 6G in about 5 years, like we did for 3G.
4G is ending up as the replacement to 2G as the base network. I suspect 5G networks will be shut down before 4G ones given IoT devices are largely setting on the low power variants of LTE.