Motorola’s 5G Moto Mod speed test was massively misleading
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/5/1...on-tech-summit
Motorola wants you to know that it demoed a real Verizon 5G connection on a real 5G phone in Maui that over 330 journalists and analysts were able to see in person. It wants you to know that phone is capable of incredible 5Gbps speeds — enough to apparently download an entire season of your favorite TV show in mere minutes.
So when journalists tried out Motorola’s speed test demo, they naturally did the math. By measuring how long it supposedly took Motorola’s 5G Moto Mod to download a 1GB file in a special Motorola demo app, PCMag and PC World each independently reported speeds of 470Mbps.
But those numbers just aren’t accurate. As The Verge reported yesterday — and confirmed with Motorola — the 5G connection in Maui is running at a comparatively anemic
130 to 140Mbps.
Did Motorola fake the demo? Is there actually any 5G in Maui at all? These are the questions we’re all wondering. When I spoke to Motorola, it assured me that the test was real.
According to Doug Michau, Motorola’s head of product operations who is in charge of the Maui demos, we did actually witness a real 5G demo that beamed data over a millimeter wave signal from an Ericsson base station directly to the 4x4 MIMO antennas inside Motorola’s 5G Moto Mod.
Those files weren’t downloaded from the actual internet, but rather an on-site server, which means we’re not seeing real-world performance.
More importantly, the files appear to have been compressed to smaller file sizes when they passed through the network [so the file wasn't 1gb in actual size]
But it is meaningful in the context of 5G speeds because downloading one gigabyte of file isn’t the same as simply having the file on your device. With compression, it’s impossible to get any idea of 5G speeds or extrapolate 470Mbps+ speeds from a 140Mbps connection. And that means that the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit in Maui — the last, best chance for journalists to see what 5G is really capable of before AT&T launches the tech in mere weeks — can’t actually do that job.
