Detect the Bottleneck of Commercial 5G in China

The emerging 5G has been attracting many new users due to its higher bandwidth, lower latency and better scalability compared to existing 4G LTE. However, despite the revolutionary advancement in mobile network, the wired network, i.e., the Internet, and the vast majority of mobile applications show no signs of corresponding upgradation, which may restrict the further deployment and development of 5G. In this paper, we conduct a detailed analysis on the commercial 5G in China to detect its bottleneck. We inspect a crowed-sourced speed test service in China. After analyzing over 7000 speed test records from 105 cities, we discover that the Internet infrastructure has become the performance bottleneck in some 5G-oriented scenarios. We also conduct a series of experiments on COTS smartphones. We observe that inappropriate design of mobile applications is another obstacle to unleashing the power of 5G. As the world is entering the era of 5G, our findings indicate the need to develop Internet with higher capacity and applications that are more 5G-friendly.