Speed:

5G speeds will range from ~50 Mbit/s to over a gigabit/s. The fastest 5G is known as mmWave. As of July 3, 2019, mmWave had a top speed of 1.8 Gbit/s on AT&T’s 5G network.

Sub-6 GHz 5G (mid-band 5G), by far the most common, will usually deliver between 100 and 400 Mbit/s, but will have a much farther reach than mmWave, especially outdoors.

Low-band spectrum offers the greatest range, thereby a greater coverage area for a given site, but is slower than the others.

5G NR (New Radio) speed in sub-6 GHz bands can be slightly higher than the 4G with a similar amount of spectrum and antennas, although some 3GPP 5G networks will be slower than some advanced 4G networks, such as T-Mobile’s LTE/LAA network, which achieves 500+ Mbit/s in Manhattan and Chicago. The 5G specification allows LAA (License Assisted Access) as well, but LAA in 5G has not yet been demonstrated. Adding LAA to an existing 4G configuration can add hundreds of megabits per second to the speed, but this is an extension of 4G, not a new part of the 5G standard.

The similarity in terms of throughput between 4G and 5G in the existing bands is because 4G already approaches the Shannon limit on data communication rates. 5G speeds in the less common millimeter wave spectrum, with its much more abundant bandwidth and shorter range, and hence greater frequency reusability, can be substantially higher.