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As it was before?
I remember well the days when you had to use a modem over a dial-up connection to connect to the Internet from home. What a joy it was to hear a squeak mixed with hiss, which meant that the connection – hurrah! – installed. And you can start a long and hard download of a new movie.
If at that moment someone had said that in a few years my phone would be more powerful than my then computer, and the Internet would become truly mobile and very fast, I would just laugh. But today you can watch movies on your smartphone even without any download – through streaming services, in real time. And the power and speed of modern gadgets is enough for this. But sometimes you want even faster.
What pre-5G?
MegaFon timed the launch of a new pre-5G option, which promises an increase in mobile Internet speed up to 30%, to coincide with the next update of the tariff line. Such an increase was made possible due to a combination of several factors at once, where the main role is played by updating the traffic management service model – using system situational network load management and several modern technologies.
It so happened historically that I have been a subscriber of MegaFon for more than twenty years – since the time when the company was called “North-West GSM”. I have never had any complaints about the mobile Internet of this operator. And not only with me: for 5 years now, mobile Internet from MegaFon has been recognized as the fastest in Our Country. But since I got the pre-5G option along with the tariff, I decided to test its capabilities in practice. The speed of the Internet, as well as the engine power of the car, does not happen much!
How was the experiment
For pre-5G testing, I used two smartphones: an older iPhone 8 Plus and a slightly newer iPhone XS. It was interesting how fast the Internet would be both when watching streaming video (which I started with) and when downloading content. For instrumental speed measurement on both gadgets, I installed the widespread Speedtest application from the developer Ookla.
The observations were made on Sunday evening. With the G56,7, everything turned out to be not so obvious: the Internet accelerated, but the result was floating from measurement to measurement, and the maximum download speed was 5 megabits per second. However, with a Megafon SIM card, but without pre-45,7G, the maximum was at the level of 24 Mbps. The difference is XNUMX%.
But the “top ten” accelerated more seriously: here the download speed increased from 58,6 to 78,9. Almost 35%!
There is a feeling that in a busy network, a more modern smartphone is able to work more efficiently with new technology, maintaining a higher connection speed. And although MegaFon declares the work of pre-5G on any devices with LTE, it is easy to guess that customers focused on “fast” tariffs most likely have fairly recent smartphone models.
Closer to the night, when the load on the network became less, Speedtest recorded the most significant increase in speed – in one of the measurements I saw a result of 131 Mbps on the screen. In practical terms, this means that video streaming will fly!
I decided to arrange another “smartphone race” in the morning by downloading a three-hour video. And I found that the connection speed is significantly higher than the night before, although it is naturally inferior to the night one. And of my two smartphones (regardless of the model and year of manufacture), at any given time, the one in which the SIM card with pre-5G is located works faster.
Who needs it and when pre-5G?
For example, I don’t watch movies on my smartphone so often – well, maybe on the same business trips and during flights. But I actively use streaming services – for example, I turn on YouTube content in the background to listen on the road: I often have to travel by car from Moscow to St. Petersburg and back. High speed will definitely be useful here. It will come in handy for e-sports players, and, for example, designers, and everyone who constantly downloads heavy content for work.
How to connect pre-5G?
This option is included by default in the “package” of three MegaFon tariffs – “Maximum”, VIP and “Premium”. For other subscribers, it is available as a plug-in option: the price of the issue is 399 rubles per month.
You can connect separately, but as for me, if high-speed Internet, stable broadcasts are important to you, or if, for example, you regularly make video calls, it is much more profitable to immediately choose one of the tariff plans, where pre-5G is already included in the list of services. Indeed, as a rule, such a tariff also implies a larger margin for monthly traffic (which is quite logical).
The result?
Indeed, there are practical benefits from the new technology. The jewelry redistribution of traffic in a busy network will allow owners of smartphones with the connected pre-5G option to fully appreciate the benefits that a fast connection provides.
MegaFon, in fact, became the first operator whose tariff plans differ not only in content, that is, in the volume of minutes, SMS and gigabytes included in them, but also in the speed of mobile Internet. At the same time, the new option will allow subscribers to be smarter about spending: customers with any consumption will be able to use it if they need a higher speed.