# Mobile Broadband Performance Evaluation: Analysis of National Reports
## 4 5G Communication Status
### Evaluating 5G Performance  
Understanding the characteristics of 5G as well as its applications and services before attempting to evaluate its performance is critical. Hence, in this section, we first investigate what is different in 5G and then point out how to evaluate its performance.  
Coverage, be it geographical vs. population, indoor vs. outdoor, urban vs. rural, or any other way, will remain one of the key metrics in evaluation 5G [26]. There are inherent problems that are associated with evaluating coverage even when one is dealing with only mobile broadband services operating in narrow bands. Meanwhile, 5G is going to make use of mmWave and other unconventional bands, which will make evaluating coverage a more complicated task. To emphasize that a summary of coverage by Signals Research Group (SGR) is presented here.  
The first task the group undertook is to compare the performance of 5G with its predecessor 4G in different situations and countries. In Korea, the testers drive around COEX small at the night and walked during the afternoon as well as evening [26; 27]; 4G and 5G phones, under SK telecom, were used to test the performance. In addition, adjustments, to reflect the resource blocks (RBs) assigned to the phones, are made. The raw and the normalized results both confirmed that there is a faster speed when using 5G phones, 2.6\(\times\) times faster to be specific.  
Similar measurements by SGR were conducted in London, UK, Bern, Switzerland, and Minneapolis, US, via EE, Swisscom, and Verizon operators, respectively. All tests confirmed that 5G networks provide a faster speed than that of 4G.  
However, this is expected and obvious and there are other major surprises in the study. The first one comes while testing mmWave [26]. Although the researchers were facing in the opposite direction of the 5G transmitter and there was no direct transmission to the phone, the 5G phone received a signal as well as relevant throughput, which was unexpected. It was later discovered that such a phenomenon occurred due to the reflection of mmWave signal on nearby glasses, which led the group to conclude the unique behavior of mmWave requires further investigation.  
Another unexpected result was observed during the analysis of the signal quality of 5G mmWave while placing the phone in landscape or portrait mode. Both the beam reference-signal-received-power (BRSRP) and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) exhibited a better performance in portrait mode. On the theme of phone behavior towards mmWave, another test where the phone was placed below two hands (death-grip) showed that there is performance degradation both in terms of BRSRP and SNR. It was clear that even in that scenario 5G with mmWave shows a better result than 4G.  
These and other results from the study suggested that the signal strength, which in turn may affect the coverage quality evaluation, from 5G mmWave is stronger and unique than anticipated. Therefore, better coverage analysis methodologies shall be used in the future. One such approach is to enlist robust pieces of equipment such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as proposed here [28].