@article{KHAN2025108153,
title = {How mature is 5G deployment? A cross-sectional, year-long study of 5G uplink performance},
journal = {Computer Communications},
volume = {237},
pages = {108153},
year = {2025},
issn = {0140-3664},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comcom.2025.108153},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140366425001100},
author = {Imran Khan and Moinak Ghoshal and Joana Angjo and Sigrid Dimce and Mushahid Hussain and Paniz Parastar and Yenchia Yu and Xueting Deng and Sumit Hawal and Shirui Huang and Ameya Rane and Yin Wang and Claudio Fiandrino and Charalampos Orfanidis and Shivang Aggarwal and Ana C. Aguiar and Ozgu Alay and Carla Fabiana Chiasserini and Falko Dressler and Y. Charlie Hu and Steven Y. Ko and Dimitrios Koutsonikolas and Joerg Widmer},
keywords = {5G, Mobile networks},
abstract = {After a rapid deployment worldwide over the past few years, 5G is expected to have reached a mature deployment stage to provide measurable improvement of network performance and user experience over its predecessors. In this study, we aim to assess 5G deployment maturity via three conditions: (1) Does 5G performance remain stable over a long time span (1 year)? (2) Does 5G provide better performance than its predecessor Long-Term Evolution (LTE)? (3) Does the technology offer similar performance across diverse geographic areas and cellular operators? We answer this important question by conducting two year-long measurement campaigns of 5G uplink performance leveraging a custom Android app: one crowd-sourced, cross-sectional campaign spanning 8 major cities in 7 countries and two different continents (Europe and North America), and one controlled campaign focusing on mmWave deployment at a fixed location in the downtown area of Boston, MA. Our datasets show that 5G deployment in major cities appears to have matured, with no major performance improvements observed over a one-year period, but 5G does not provide consistent, superior measurable performance over LTE, especially in terms of latency, and further there exists clear uneven 5G performance across the 8 cities. Our study suggests that, while 5G deployment appears to have stagnated, it is short of delivering its promised performance and user experience gain over its predecessor.}
}