Car And Driver: WSJ Tests The 5G RV Challenge

It was a simple plan. Take an RV, add three 5G smartphones, and see how 15 different gadgets work when connected to the country's new and growing 5G network. The takeaway: while cool, 5G isn't exactly ready to stream your 4K entertainment on a visit to the national parks.

Joanna Stern, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, makes videos that explain new consumer technology in ways new consumers can understand. For her latest adventure (well, actually, "adventure"), she rigged up an RV with more tech than the average dorm room in order to see if a single tethered 5G connection would be enough to get a family through your average evening (read: lots and lots of streaming video) and parked it next to a Verizon 5G small cell tower in Jersey City, New Jersey.

In Stern's limited test, which she called the 5G RV Challenge, things worked insanely well for the most part. With over a dozen gadgets all running off a single tethered Verizon OnePlus 8 smartphone, she was able to run multiple 4K video streams alongside standard video calls, and gaming even worked better than compared to her video game tester's wired home Internet services. Uploading, on the other hand, was a bit slower than her home Wi-Fi, but she pointed out that uploading massive files from a phone isn't exactly as valuable as being able to send out gigabytes per minute the way it can be on your home computer.

The key point here, of course, is that 5G isn't available everywhere just yet, and it's certainly not available in the places where going in an RV makes the most sense. (Check out coverage maps from Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.) That's because 5G is still being rolled out, and even beyond that there are two kinds of 5G signals: mmWave and Sub-6. The mmWave signal is the faster of the two, but it has the tremendous drawback that it can't go through walls and really only works within a few hundred feet of a tower. Sub-6 sends its signal further than mmWave, but even so, not everyone can use their smartphone to power their connected #VanLife.

Check out the full article from Car and Driver here.