Forbes Column

February 11, 2020
Samsung S20+ And Ultra Launch Finally Brings “Full 5G” to Market

By Bob O'Donnell

Though the vast majority of people don’t realize it, there hasn’t been a “true” 5G phone on the market until now. Oh sure, there have been several phones that have offered 5G, but each of them only supported a portion of the total 5G standard—specifically either sub-6 GHz or millimeter wave. In fact, ironically, the Samsung Note 10+ 5G was actually available in two different versions from different carriers—one that only supported sub-6 and one that only supported mmWave.

With today’s announcement of the S20+ and S20 Ultra, however, Samsung has finally dealt with that issue and, as of March 6 in the US, will be offering the first phones that support the complete set of 5G standards, notably both sub-6 and mmWave. (For more on the differences between the two and the importance of them, see “The Top 5 Fallacies About 5G”.)

For people who may have been reticent about purchasing a 5G phone until the full standard was supported, this is an important step. It’s also important from an industry perspective to finally start to bring a more complete product to market.

From a performance perspective, however, the truth is that it isn’t initially going to make any difference. First of all, in the US, only AT&T and T-Mobile currently offer both sub-6 and mmWave service, and in both cases, their mmWave support is limited to a few sections of a few cities around the country. More importantly, however, there is no modem technology currently available that can leverage 5G signals in the sub-6 GHz spectrum and 5G signals in the mmWave spectrum at the same time. You can only get one or the other (even in locations where both types of signals from a single telecom provider may be available).

Now, the good news is, supporting both types of frequencies means realistically speaking that you will have sub-6 GHz 5G in a number of places (and, theoretically, nationwide in the not too distant future) and then, when you stumble into a mmWave “zone”, the phone will switch to that faster form of 5G. In other words, you no longer have to have two different 5G phones to access the complete 5G spectrum—not that anyone ever actually did that. In addition, as the carriers upgrade their networks to support additional parts of the 5G spectrum—as all of them are planning to do—these phones will be ready for those changes. In other words, they’re future proofed. Finally, for those who want to have the most flexibility in carrier choices, these are the first 5G phones that you’ll be able to use if you want to switch from any US carrier to any other. Clearly, there are some practical benefits to incorporating both sub-6 and mmWave technologies into these devices, but those benefits are more focused on range and availability of 5G signal than performance.

It’s important to point out that because of a technology called Dual Connectivity (see “How Fast Will 5G Really Be?” for more) you can combine 4G LTE bandwidth with either sub-6 GHz 5G or mmWave 5G (but not both), depending on what type of coverage is available. (FYI, that’s also true of devices that only support either sub-6 or mmWave.) Dual Connectivity is an important, but little-known technology that will enable carriers to improve the performance of their early 5G networks over time, particularly those based on sub-6 GHz spectrum.

Speaking of which, there’s another very interesting insight into the state of 5G from Samsung’s announcement: the standard S20 only supports sub-6, not mmWave, even though it has the same Qualcomm 855 chip and x55 modem as the other two phones. In order to reduce costs, Samsung chose not to integrate the additional chips (collectively referred to as the RF, or Radio Frequency, Front End) and antennas necessary to enable mmWave support in the basic S20. (The S20 is $999, while the S20+ is $1,199 and the S20 Ultra is $1,399.) This is important to understand, because it underscores the fact that we are going to continue to see a lot of devices that only support one portion of the 5G spectrum or the other. It’s not good enough just to know what modem a particular smartphone has inside, because device vendors have the option to enable certain technologies but not others.

The other practical implication of this decision is that the standard S20 is being made available on every carrier except Verizon because, for now, all of Verizon’s 5G is mmWave only. As a result, it would make no sense to offer a 5G phone that couldn’t work with its 5G service.

Also, as the announcement of the foldable Galaxy Z Flip (which doesn’t have any support for 5G) demonstrates, just because we’ve finally entered the era when more “complete” 5G phones are available does not mean the end of 4G LTE devices—far from it. For many people, the wide availability and good enough speeds of current generation LTE Advanced Pro-based devices and services are plenty for their purposes. Plus, as both the Galaxy Z Flip and the similarly 5G-less foldable Motorola Razr highlight, some form factors and designs just aren’t going to work with the current requirements for 5G. That will certainly change over time, but I think it’s safe to expect we’ll see the 4G/5G crossover phase last through to about the middle of this decade.

There’s certainly much more to Samsung’s latest phone launches than just its cellular connectivity—the camera improvements on the S20+ and the S20 Ultra, in particular, are very impressive—but as we enter the full 5G era, expect to see 5G as a critical differentiator between devices and vendors for several years to come.

Disclosure: TECHnalysis Research is a tech industry market research and consulting firm and, like all companies in that field, works with many technology vendors as clients, some of whom may be listed in this article.

Here’s a link to the original column: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobodonnell/2020/02/11/samsung-s20-and-ultra-launch-finally-brings-full-5g-to-market/

Forbes columnist Bob O'Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, a market research and consulting firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community.