Related: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lohttps://www....

"Tests carried out by research group PolicyTracker, and shared with BBC's Morning Live, found that nearly 40% of the time a phone displays the 5G symbol, it is actually using a 4G connection"

I worked for a mobile network company a few years ago, the vibe I got there was that 5G penetration was still years away and that none of the providers were anywhere near ready for it.

Interestingly that company built a bridge of sorts allowing providers to get more life out of their older hard and software, converting e.g. 5G signals to 4G and 4G to 3G (where a signal is for example a phone phoning home telling the provider they used a megabyte of data, or looking up the IP address when calling a phone number)

Also where 2/3/4G network signals were all their own protocols (RADIUS and DIAMETER), 5G is just HTTP. And where for the 3G/4G stuff they had to write their own code to handle the protocols, for the 5G stuff they just used the cURL library. That is, cURL powers 5G networks.

At least there's some merit to that, since many network don't yet use a 5G core (or SIM cards aren't capable of using it), so the definition of when you "are on 5G" is really murky: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/5g-nsa

fixing link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lo