I live in Clitheroe and have been waiting for 5G for some time.
Recently I noticed 5G was appearing on my phone but I wasn't get any increase in speeds. As we are all lead to believe 5G was going to be amazing with realistic speeds up to 1Gbps. So far the fastest I've come across is around 550Mbps so still way off the mark.
Anyway, so after some research I found there's 2x 5G enabled transmitters around Clitheroe on the outskirts but not the main mast in Clitheroe centre. This was confirmed by the technical department in EE in that this is NOT 5G enabled transmitter.
When I questioned why I was getting a 5G signal on my phone they said I was probably picking up one of the other masts which is 5G (2KM away) rather than the one I'm practically sat on top of. Not believing this I went into the engineering mode on my phone and confirmed the Cell ID of the mast I was connected to and confirmed it was the same one with Cellmapper.net. I was indeed connected to the one in town.
I also did some more checks by visiting the other sites and confirming I was connected to those masts and the ID matched to confirm all my data was accurate.
So I can confirm these facts:
The main mast in Clitheroe is not 4G but when connected I get a 5G signal on my phone.
When connected to the same mast I get no better speeds than when it was 4G.
When visiting the other 2x 5G enabled masts in more rural locations I get speeds over 100Mpbs but still nowhere near what I would expect from 5G capable speeds.
So is EE just changing the identifier from 4G to say 5G on peoples phones to make people believe they are in more places than they really are? The evidence suggests this to me anyway.
And in the places where 5G really is (still only have their word for it that it's 5G) why are the speeds so poor?
I did run this by the monkeys at customer services who couldn't give any answer, so tried twitter a while back and they just bounced me around for a while not giving me any answers either until my patience was tested to the max and gave up.
