Tech View: Highly touted 5G’s advantage is more bandwidth and speed

One hears the term “5G” quite often. In case you didn’t know, it’s the fifth-generation technology standard for broadband cellular networks. It’s been rolled out with great fanfare over the past few years, but what does it mean for the consumer and business user?

To answer this question, you need to have a 5G phone. Your older phones will work on the network, but you’re not going to see any difference without a 5G device. To test the network, I used a Google Pixel 6 Pro, Google’s top-of-the-line product, on my existing T-Mobile account.

So what are 5G’s advantages?

In short, more bandwidth. That means faster internet speeds, lower latency and improved accessing/watching/downloading videos.

The signal also travels farther and is better able to penetrate walls and into buildings. That means fewer dropped calls. I tested this theory extensively in a geographic area near my home where I previously dropped calls with regularity. 5G (and the new Pixel 6 phone) put an end to this. That alone was a huge improvement.

T-Mobile’s (free) “Scam Shield” services are part of the network’s offerings, and they are incredibly handy. (You don’t need a 5G phone to use them.) One component that I use daily is their “Scam Likely” warning, which appears on your screen if an incoming call looks suspicious. Don’t even bother to answer if you see this alert. (If the caller is legit, they’ll leave a number.) They also provide “Scam ID,” which verifies whether the number coming in belongs to a real person, and Scam Block, to stop unwanted calls. There’s also a scam/spam protection serv­ice for unwanted text messaging.

What advantages are there for the small-business user?

Denis Salle, founder of EC3, a medical billing and consulting firm in Honolulu, says T-Mobile’s 5G network has been a “communications game changer” for his company. Case in point: Salle uses WhatsApp to communicate with his software development team in India. He said he can now speak to them outside the confines of his office Wi-Fi network. That means conference calls to India during late-night walks with his dog in Kaimuki. “I couldn’t do that before 5G,” said Salle.

The same goes for Dr. Brad Willcox, an East Honolulu-based physician and scientist who studies healthy aging and has written a New York Times bestseller, “Okinawan Program.” It’s not unusual for Willcox to walk up Wilhelmina Rise, phone in hand, and speak his twin brother on Okinawa daily. “With the onset of COVID, I work out of my house quite a bit these days. With 5G I’m able to FaceTime my brother Craig, going over research and getting a little exercise.”

The Pixel Pro 6 on 5G

Using the Pixel 6 Pro phone made the 5G experience gratifying. At 6.7 inches and priced at $900, it’s an expensive handful, but the screen is superb, as is the camera array. Yes, array. There are three cameras on the phone, a 50-megapixel-­wide “main shooter,” a 12MP-wide angle camera and a 4x optical zoom telephoto shooter.

This system is a huge incentive for anyone who uses photography in their work, or for a hobbyist who wants great images. I used the camera extensively and the quality was first class. If you’re posting content online, it’s ideal and equally handy for everyday use. I tested the camera and found it exceptional in low-light situations — indoors or at dusk — where ordinarily you’d need a flash.

With 128 gigs of storage, there’s plenty of room for photos, videos, etc. Battery life was average with this phone, but I can live with that.

What I loved was the vastly improved (compared with my 2-year-old Samsung Galaxy S10E) dictation capabilities. It’s much easier to dictate your text or email instead of picking away at the keyboard. (Google refers to this as Voice type.) With this phone the voice recognition is incredibly accurate.

I also liked Pixel’s fingerprint security sensor on the screen as opposed to my old Samsung, on the power switch, which was a bit more finicky. Finally, the crisp, big screen on the Pixel 6 Pro was really nice. At this stage of my life, I don’t want to be staring into a teeny­-weeny display.

Some folks are skeptical about the hype surrounding the latest, greatest technology, and they should be. However, if your business depends on communicating with customers, a decent 5G phone on a 5G network makes a whole lot of sense.

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Rob Kay, a Honolulu-based writer, covers technology and sustainability for Tech View and is the creator of fijiguide.com. He can be reached at Robertfredkay@gmail.com.