I live in a poured concrete house built in 1950s Ireland. My 2.4Ghz doorbell struggles to speak to an AP about 1 meter away from it through the external wall. I just did a 5G speedtest from my bed and got 250Mbps.
They are certainly not using mmWave 5G. Numbers show (1st Google result) that less than 1% of time connected is to a mmWave network. I don't personally get why mmWave part of 5G is talked so much about.
5G over the same cmWave frequencies 4G uses still has a benefit - but mainly for the operator! It allows them more users and throughput for the same amount of spectrum. So in a rational market, the operators should be giving you discounts for using 5G instead of charging more for it!
I just benchmarked from my suburban second floor bedroom in the US, and got mmWave (it says 5G UC which is apparently mmWave) and got 500mbit/sec
So I guess some people have it, and use it? It’s basically always on around my neighborhood, but I guess I live in a nice city and Sprint’s old HQ is down the street so that probably has a lot to do with it.
~3.4GHz-4GHz (which is the 'primary' 5G band) in Europe can provide excellent speeds (2gbit/sec real world no problem to a phone) but without the terrible signal degrigation you get on mmWave.
mmWave will be used more in the future once the other bands get saturated, but it's a bit ahead of its time now.
