The big three carriers - AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon - have always jockeyed for position to get enough spectrum for their needs, but most of those licenses for the lower-band frequencies used by 3G and 4G/LTE were issued years ago. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) allocates and licenses spectrum for each carrier. Radio frequencies have always been a limited resource. If you’ve ever tried to set up a Wi-Fi router in your home, you may have already encountered this on a smaller scale: 2.4GHz Wi-Fi travels farther and penetrates solid objects more effectively than 5GHz Wi-Fi, but it’s not nearly as fast and can’t handle as many devices.

Put simply, lower frequencies offer significantly better range and coverage than higher ones but don’t offer as much capacity or bandwidth. These weren’t a factor in 4G/LTE network deployments since they all used the same low-band spectrum. Jesse Hollington / Digital Trendsīy comparison, 5G runs the gamut from the same low-band spectrum used by 4G/LTE to the extremely high frequency (EHF) 27GHz–39GHz spectrum - and there’s every indication newer 5G deployments could go even higher.Ĭombined with the advances pioneered by 5G technology, these additional blocks of the spectrum offer unique advantages and disadvantages. Some deployments went slightly beyond that - as high as 2.3GHz on AT&T and 2.5GHz on Sprint - but those were less common. Green and orange dots on your iPhone? Here’s what they really meanįor example, 3G and 4G/LTE services typically ran in the 600MHz (0.6GHz) to 1.9GHz spectrum. What is 5G? Speeds, coverage, comparisons, and more What is Amazon Music: everything you need to know

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