5G still feels like the next big thing, even though we’ve been talking about it for years, and even Apple got on board with the iPhone 12 a few years after early Android attempts.

The problem is, 5G just doesn’t fare well in your city, most likely:

• Ookla, the owner of old faithful speedtest.net tested 5G availability and 5G speeds in 30 global cities, including New York City, Seoul, Amsterdam, Abu Dhabi, Vienna, Warsaw, Rome, Paris, Beijing, and Berlin.
• That was part of its Global 5G Benchmark Report Q1-Q2 2021 white paper, which is freely available.
• There were three main measurements made to assess the progress of 5G rollouts: 5G download speed, 5G upload speed, and network availability.
• It looks like this:

The good news on speed:

• 29 of the 30 cities had median download speeds of over 100Mbps (only Warsaw in Poland missed out).
• 13 of the cities showed median 5G download speeds above 200Mbps.
• For uploads, again, almost every city achieved median upload speeds between 15 Mbps and 40 Mbps.
• Which is all pretty good though you have to sift through the data to see the better download speeds in Seoul, the Middle East, and limited parts of Asia.
• Plus Helsinki. Thanks to Nokia being a local company, I’d guess.

The bad news on availability:

• But if 5G isn’t available, even in these major cities, is there any point talking speeds?
• Only two cities had above 50% availability, meaning “…that a majority of users in that city were able to spend a
• majority of their time on 5G networks.”
• Those two cities were New York and Amsterdam, while Seoul was next best at 48%.
• That’s all down to how hyperlocal 5G was, is, and will remain for the near future.
• Take this example where my colleague C. Scott Brown drove just five minutes from his house into the heart of Yale University to test Google Stadia on 5G for AT&T. That story is all about 5G availability problems.
• As for me in Berlin? Heh. If you look at the graph above, you’ll see Berlin with just a few percent of availability, and one of the lowest speeds when available, too.
• Curiously, Singapore, that tiny island city nation and bustling metropolis, ranks worse. It seems SingTel there only got going on 5G in early 2021, and won’t be finished covering the country until 2025.
• Convincing people to pay more for 5G is a chicken/egg situation: Who will pay more when availability is that bad? Why would networks build 5G if they can’t extract more money, somehow?
• So, here we are…