OnePlus 7 Pro 5G in the wild: testing Sprint’s NYC 5G network

Sprint confirmed in early August that it will be bringing a 5G-capable OnePlus telephone that may work on the provider’s network. As we predicted, that system is the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G, and we acquired to take it for a spin round New York City.

Sprint 5G in NYC works on the 2.5Ghz bandwidth which, promotional supplies declare, will get round 400Mbps – not fairly the 1Gbps achieved by millimeter wave, however a lot greater than 4G LTE speeds. 

The service went reside in NYC in the present day in addition to Washington DC, with Phoenix and Los Angeles networks going reside tomorrow – however there’s lots of consideration on the Big Apple resulting from tougher terrain: the metropolis has three to 4 occasions the sign density of much less populated city areas in North America, a Sprint govt claimed at a media occasion launching the NYC network.

The metropolis’s protection space extends from Central Park right down to the southern tip of Manhattan at launch, Sprint claimed and, in our fast exams, we discovered that to be largely true: when roaming from Midtown close to Bryant Park right down to the East Village, we solely flickered right down to 4G/LTE a handful of occasions, and noticed speeds subsequently dive right down to 3-5Mbps.

We didn’t fairly see the roughly 400Mbps Sprint claimed in its media presentation – not in the space they particularly steered would get these speeds. Instead, we caught a median of 200Mbps, often rising up 250Mbps and, not often, as much as 333Mbps.

That’s a far cry from the peak 1.4Gbps we noticed with the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G when hooked as much as Verizon 5G that we examined in Chicago, however Sprint’s network spans a far wider space than the handful of neighborhoods that Verizon’s millimeter wave setup covers. 

More importantly, we didn’t need to do the “5G shuffle” hopping between nodes: after we examined Verizon’s Chicago network, its millimeter wave emitters projected in such a small radius that we needed to maintain them in line-of-sight to take care of such excessive speeds. Not so with the 2.5Ghz Sprint network, which reliably delivered the aforementioned 200Mbps median speeds throughout its protection space.

We’ll need to do extra intensive testing to see how widespread that space is: in contrast to T-Mobile 5G, Sprint hasn’t launched a selected protection map for NYC, Washington DC, or any of its different cities.

(Image credit score: Future)

What’s all that pace for?

Practically talking, we haven’t discovered important makes use of for the highwater 1.4Gbps speeds we noticed in Verizon’s network – we’ve primarily put it to work shortly downloading media as an armchair comparability metric. 

Instead of downloading the total first season of Netflix’s Stranger Things in just below 39 seconds, as we achieved in our Verizon 5G check with the Galaxy S10 5G in Chicago, the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G on Sprint 5G downloaded it in below 5 minutes.

In different phrases, you would queue up a brief season of TV in the time it takes for the subsequent subway practice to reach, or whereas ready for a latte. 

Sprint 5G in the present day… and past

Sprint is launching its 5G network in NYC and…