Did you get the latest news? 5G is now available on Sprint in Chicago. Yep! 

Sprint turned on 5G in one of their most important and largest markets – Chicago, this summer.

Gadget fans and tech bloggers have already started to experiment with it by running speed tests, focusing on user experience in high traffic areas like Chicago downtown, checking coverage and using apps… like there’s no tomorrow. We’ve waited for proper conclusions to be drawn before we deliver the key points.

The expert at rcwirless.com tested “the service from the user’s perspective, mimicking typical mobile user behavior, including a mix of pedestrian, in-vehicle, and indoor usage. I was not just looking for speeds, but also evaluating coverage and user experience for various data-heavy applications. Additionally, I utilized engineering tools such as Spirent’s Umetrix to simulate typical user behavior. All the testing was done without the knowledge of site locations, only using general coverage guidance provided by Sprint.”.  A Samsung Galaxy S10 5G and a LG V50 were used for testing.

📲 High traffic areas checked

Good news: “The first priority for any operator is providing good coverage and much-needed capacity in the high traffic areas. And Sprint has adhered to that. The beautiful Northwestern University campus on the beaches of Lake Michigan in the downtown is one such area, where you can see throngs of students on their phones and laptops round the clock. I saw impressive speeds in many areas of the campus.”

Overall speeds were more than 100 -150 Mbps in most of the places.

Indoor places with many windows are not an issue for keeping a steady 5G, yet some brick walls or dense concrete are, understandably, a different story. The bright side is that when you move out of the 5G coverage, it seamlessly switches to 4G without you ever noticing it.

This possible due to “dual-connectivity, which allows simultaneous connectivity to both 4G and 5G. So, even when the 5G connection drops, the 4G connection is always there to take over.”

🤳 The conclusion: “pretty impressive”

You can always head down to this article for more juicy details about the overall testing marathon, but we’ll leave you with this summary: “With the expansive coverage that Sprint’s 5G network provides, users will see meaningful improvement in most of the data-heavy applications they currently use and will be able to experience new things like downloading a movie in minutes, instant access to the content on the cloud as if it’s on their phone, and more. I am more than confident to say that Sprint’s Chicago network delivers on the promise of 5G, and is something that users can really use and experience now! ”

If you’re using Tello in Chicago and want to go 5G, you’ll need one of the smartphones below. Bring it along anytime you feel like it, friend! 

• LG V50 ThinQ
• Samsung Galaxy S10 5G
• OnePlus 7 Pro
• HTC Blinkbox 5G

The list of cities for which 5G is available is constantly growing, and so far, according to Sprint includes: “Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, New York City, Phoenix and Washington, D.C., covering approximately 2,100 square miles and 11 million people total across all nine market areas.”