A week after the launch of 5G in Paris, switched on on March 19, we were able to try Orange’s new generation mobile network in the heart of the capital, then in the suburbs where it has been active for several months – without exceeding, confinement requires, the limits of Ile-de-France.
Throughout the day of March 25, we measured its performance in about fifty places in total. To move from one point to another, we kept two smartphones in front of us at all times to monitor the quality of the network, one in 5G, the other restricted in 4G.
Disappointing day. We did not notice any difference while surfing the Internet or checking our emails. We expected it, so we had planned about fifteen more demanding applications to try to observe a speed difference between mobiles connected in 4G and 5G. But there again, we did not notice any significant difference, neither on the social networks TikTok, Facebook and Pinterest, nor with VOD services like Netflix, YouTube, Arte or Disney. All these applications launch exactly as quickly in 4G as in 5G, all offer identical image quality.
The only difference observed: downloads
The same goes for Google Earth which displays its urban landscapes in three dimensions as quickly in 4G, or with Cafeyn which loads its magazines with a comparable average delay. Incidentally, we noted, thanks to a performance measurement tool, that 4G reacts almost as quickly as 5G to within two or three milliseconds: for the moment, the latency of the new network is comparable to that of the old one. . The only difference we saw was the downloads. 5G speeds up the retrieval of attachments or music tracks slightly, but only occasionally, and only a second is saved.
We must tackle heavy documents such as 3D games or long videos to finally observe a major difference. In our tests, it took five times less time to download on average in 5G. But we didn’t see this gain all the time: only 60% of the time. In 20% of scenarios, 4G was found to be faster. In the remaining cases, 5G was not available.
During our visit to Gare du Nord, we slipped into a train, and we loved downloading a film at full speed between two wagons. How many travelers by train or car do not manage to watch their video to the end because they do not capture in the countryside?
Hearing the controller whistle, and jumping off the train, however, reason took over: this kind of scenario is rare. Ile-de-France residents have little need to download videos as it has become easy to view them in streaming, even in the metro, which is now properly covered in 4G. As for downloading games, most gamers can wait five minutes rather than one – or prefer to download these kinds of massive files over WiFi anyway from home.
5G is not available everywhere
Because 5G has many flaws. Its reliability is currently disappointing, in Paris as in the northern and western suburbs. Even when the phone shows three out of four small bars next to the 5G symbol, which should ensure good connection quality, downloads occasionally fail, or get disproportionately long. At these times, we would prefer the phone to switch to 4G, because the “old generation” network is incomparably more reliable.
In addition, 5G is not available everywhere. The orange cover map indicates, however, that all of Paris and its immediate suburbs are theoretically covered. In the streets, our 5G smartphone had to fall back on 4G around 20% of the time. There are many white areas, right up to the heart of the Esplanade de la Défense, an ultramodern business district, yet poorly covered in places. In the northern suburbs of Paris, when approaching the confines of the 5G coverage area, the smartphone remains attached to the weakening network for hundreds of meters, while 4G would be significantly faster in these places.
Unlike the 4G coverage card, Orange’s 5G card does not make any promises regarding the interior of buildings. The operator chose to use mainly high frequency antennas which do not enter well. In fact, indoors, we only captured half the time, compared to 90% in 4G. The farther away from windows, doors, and roofs, the more the signal is lost. In the basements of the Gare du Nord where hundreds of thousands of travelers pass every day, 5G coverage is zero, as on the RER A tracks or on line 5 of the metro.
Last disappointment: in the places where we tested it, sending videos of families captured on mobile seemed slightly slower than in 4G. Our upstream flow measurements have confirmed it: 5G is rather slower as it is when trying to send a large file. Fortunately, for many users, this type of sending is rarely urgent, and after all quite rare.
The Orange network “in the optimization phase”
For the time being, Orange’s 5G seems to have only one advantage: significantly accelerating the downloading of games and series. A slight advantage offset by the weaknesses of this still young technology, which lacks reliability and whose coverage is disappointing.
But this observation is only a snapshot of Orange’s 5G network, valid at the end of March in certain places in Ile-de-France. Above all, this table is set to change a lot. On the one hand, the 5G network is still very little saturated by the number of subscribers that remains very minority, especially in this period when Ile-de-France residents working remotely are often connected via WiFi.
On the other hand, according to Orange, all 5G antennas have not yet been deployed, and the network is still in the “optimization phase”. In a few years, operators should adapt their core network to 5G to improve reaction times, barely better than those of 4G currently, and improve uplinks, which are less good in 5G. Then there will perhaps come ultra-high frequency, which could boost speeds in the busiest public places such as train stations. For now, 5G seems very insufficiently convincing to justify any additional cost. We recommend to wait.