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This was the year that 5G came to
the UK, promising a new era of mobile communications. But how is it
working out for those few consumers who have taken the plunge and signed
up for a service?
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| A test at Waterloo station found a wide variety of speeds available across the 5G networks tested |
Three's 5G service is not yet available for mobile phones, but it offers a home broadband service in parts of London.
To get these services, you need a 5G phone or one of Three's home broadband routers, so I borrowed equipment from all four networks and started my programme of testing.
5G promises to revolutionise the way we communicate, connecting all sorts of things - cars, lamp-posts, maybe even products on a supermarket shelf - as well as people to the internet, at lightning speeds.
But the vision of smart cities in which data flows seamlessly, creating all sorts of exciting services, is some way off.
In the short-term, the operators have to persuade consumers that it is worth trading up to 5G. For now, the big selling points are speed and a lack of congestion.
Even if you have a 4G phone, which gets a good signal in most places, you'll have experienced that moment when you travel through a major railway station or to a football stadium, and the coverage just evaporates.
5G should provide ultra-fast downloads - well above 100 megabits per second (Mbps) and as high as one gigabit per second (Gbps) - even in busy places.
Streaming 4K ultra-high resolution videos or playing an online video game against friends should be simple.
But even though I was testing the three phones in central London - one of the few places you might expect to get solid 5G - the results were disappointing.
The first shock came with the 5G handset I picked up from Vodafone in Southwark. I was shown one of the 5G masts on the building's roof and a first speed test showed a lightning-fast 700 Mbps.
But about 400m (1,312ft) away, as I walked to the tube, the speed had dropped to 50Mbps, and the 5G symbol had disappeared.
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