MOTOROLA

How Fast Is a 5G Phone? We Find Out With Z3 on Verizon
WAILEA, Hawaii-How fast is 5G? Well, on Motorola's Z3 phone and Verizon's network at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Technology Summit, we saw the gigabyte file in 17 seconds-about 470 megabits per second.
That falls short of the multi-gigabit promises we've been hearing from 5G, but it's important to understand the context here. Verizon set up a test network that was running multiple demos in the same room: the low-latency telemedicine demo with Inseego, the video-streaming demo with Samsung, and the download demos with the Z3. In other words, that was a crowded network, just like we're going to end up having in the real world. And in the real world, where you regularly get 20-40Mbps on LTE, 470Mbps on 5G is pretty solid.
Motorola's demo was the next step after the company announced its 5G Moto Mod in August. The mod is a backpack, which looks like a battery pack, and attaches to its midrange Moto Z3 phone to add 5G capability on Verizon's network.
At the time, it looked like a quick-and-easy way for Verizon to claim the "first 5G phone" mantle when no other current 5G phones had been announced. With Samsung showing off its 5G phone here at the Snapdragon Summit, the Z3 may still have a place on the first midrange 5G phone. The phone itself costs only $ 480, so if the mod is not extremely expensive, the combination will well be under what's sure to be premium prices for the Samsung and LG phones announced so far.

The speedy, but not gigabit, download shows the importance of talking about peak speeds, but about average speeds and floors. People with 4G phones typically feel the pain when their phones drop to 20Mbps, but when their phones drop to 5Mbps; the floor on today's 4G networks tends to be grindingly low.
If 5G can handle a crowd and maintain the 10x performance advantage we saw in this demo, it will finally feel like a mobile broadband experience-something the carriers have been promising for a decade now. We'll have to see how Verizon's network performs in the wild when it launches in early 2019, but for now, the signs are encouraging. Sascha Segan