5G in Letterkenny

[Seán]

I recently purchased a Samsung A51 5G from Three on prepay during the offers.  As Three's coverage map shows 5G coverage throughout Letterkenny, I bought the 5G add-on to try it out while shopping there yesterday.

Upon arriving at the Letterkenny Shopping Centre, I saw the 5G icon on my phone, however, the speed is no better than what I get on 4G there.  To double-check, I set the network mode to 4G/3G/2G Auto, run a few speed tests and repeated set back to 5G/4G/3G/2G Auto and the speed tests were roughly the same around 80Mbps.  Sure that's plenty for on a mobile, but was curious to see what 5G could get there, especially since I paid €5 for the add-on. 

One thing I did notice is that the 5G icon had just an outline around it as shown in this screenshot taken yesterday: 

According to Samsung, this means that a 5G cell is present and it should turn solid with the 5G writing in black when 5G data is connected.  However, I don't recall seeing it turn solid once yesterday while running the speed tests, so I'm wondering if 5G is live yet in Letterkenny.

[Seán]

I have finally been to Letterkenny for the first time since posting above due to the lockdown. Since then, I've been in contact with someone with a more capable Samsung S20 FE and made some interesting observations that may help others that are running into a similar issue.  Most Samsung phones show technical details of the bands they are connected on by dialling *#0011#, so I asked them to try this in each area the phone showed the solid 5G icon.

To my surprise, their phone showed it was connected to band n3 on NR (5G) everywhere the phone showed a solid 5G icon in Letterkenny.  It wasn't just in Letterkenny, but many areas all the way to Dungloe.  From checking my phone's specifications, the Samsung A51 5G supports 5G on band n78, but not the n3 band.  This explains why I still don't get 5G in Letterkenny, even though my phone worked on 5G just outside Donegal town. 

On the positive side, from the information I could find, there's little to no speed benefit with getting 5G on band n3 as it's basically a former 4G band using 5G signalling, i.e. it still has the same 15MHz of bandwidth (reported by the Samsung S20 FE) unlike the massive 100MHz of bandwidth Three has on band n78.  When I asked to try speed tests, they varied between 50Mbps to 150Mbps when their phone was on 5G band n3 compared to well over 500Mbps when they got 5G on band n78 near Dungloe.

So for anyone planning on getting a 5G phone, make sure it supports both 5G bands n3 and n78.  I really wish Three mentioned this in their 5G FAQ as I certainly would have checked beforehand.