Perhaps within the past year you’ve gotten a shiny, new iPhone 13 Pro or Pixel 6 and wondered: Where the heck is this 5G speed I was promised?
While plenty of big, new smartphones support 5G (and have for a couple of years), and providers like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T all offer 5G networks for their customers, it can be hard to actually find it while out and about. It doesn’t help that those providers have coverage maps on their websites that only show where 5G is theoretically available.
The good news is that the network speed measurement tool Speedtest (Note: Mashable and Speedtest are both owned by the same parent company, Ziff Davis) recently added a feature to its iOS app to fix this problem using data crowd-sourced from regular folks. Previously locked to Android, Speedtest coverage maps are now available for both of the biggest mobile operating systems.
Here’s how to see where you can actually find 5G near you.
How to find 5G coverage in Speedtest
First, download Speedtest from the App Store or Play Store. (It’d be weird if you didn’t do that by the time you got to this part of the article, honestly, but we all march to the beat of our own drum and whatnot.) The next step couldn’t be easier: Simply open the app and tap the “Map” tab on the lower right corner of the screen.
You should see something like the below image by default. Without altering any settings, you’ll get a coverage map for your phone’s mobile network, showing the best possible network type (i.e., 3G, LTE, 5G, etc.) available near you.
Thing is, a lot of folks still don't have 5G-enabled devices. To see a more comprehensive look at mobile networks in an area, tap the bottom of the screen.
Once you’re here, you can look at the coverage map for any other networks if you like. You can also change the map type from “Best” to “Most common” to see which connection type Speedtest registered most frequently. This isn't useful for finding 5G hot zones, but it's interesting, nonetheless.
As you can see in this sample of Queens, NY, LTE still reigns supreme. A simple explanation is that people without 5G phones count too, and most people still don't have one. It doesn't necessarily mean that 5G isn't working. That is likely to change over time as 5G adoption increases, but for now, most people are still locked to the last generation of mobile speeds.
Still, if you're lucky enough to have a 5G device, the "Best" layer will show you where you can find those blazing fast speeds in your city. It could be fun to go there and try to watch 4K YouTube videos. The rest of us will just have to live with 720p like we have for years.
UPDATE: May. 20, 2022, 2:50 p.m. EDT A previous version of this article stated that the "Most common" layer shows what networks Speedtest users connect to most often. It has been updated to clarify that the data pulls from non-5G devices as well as 5G devices.
Topics 5G
