All U.S. carriers have been pushing hard to get people to adopt 5G. After all, there's a lot of money in it, so everywhere you look, someone is ready to tell you about why you should be excited about it. The reality has been much more lackluster.
For example, if there's an event about advancements in 5G, Verizon is there to talk about its Ultra Wideband network. For a while, it boasted the fastest 5G speeds, which was because the network was all millimeter wave. That means that you get gigabit speeds, but the much harder part is getting a mmWave signal. You need to be in direct line-of-sight with an antenna, and even a window or a piece of paper can block it.
Millimeter wave signals can also suck down battery life, something that Verizon support commented on on Twitter today. In fact, the carrier said that if you want better battery life, you can just go ahead and shut off 5G altogether.
Verizon's network isn't exclusive to mmWave anymore, as it did launch a sub6 network late last year. While that won't suck down battery life in the same way, in many places, it's actually slower than 4G LTE. You should be seeing a pattern by now that leads to exactly what Verizon Wireless Customer Support tweeted: all of this is solved by simply turning off 5G and switching back to 4G.
The tweet has, unsurprisingly, been deleted, even though it's not incorrect. It's really more that the message has to continue being that 5G is just the greatest thing ever.
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