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Generated Title: 5G Promised Capacity. A Baseball Game Proves It's Still Just a Promise.
For nearly a decade, the telecommunications industry has sold us a vision of 5G. The narrative had two primary pillars: speed and capacity. The speed promise was visceral and easy to grasp—downloading a movie in seconds. The capacity promise, however, was arguably more transformative. It was the solution to the modern bottleneck: thousands of people packed into a stadium or concert venue, all trying to use their phones at once, effectively creating a digital traffic jam that turned a $1,000 smartphone into a paperweight.
We were told 5G would fix this. Its architecture was designed to handle massive device density without buckling. Yet, years into the nationwide rollout, the anecdotal evidence from anyone who’s tried to send a photo from a packed event suggests a significant discrepancy between the marketing and the reality.
Recently, a field test conducted by ZDNET outside a Chicago Cubs playoff game—detailed in the article I compared 5G network signals of Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T at a baseball stadium - here's the winner—provides a stark, numerical look at this very issue. The test pitted the three major US carriers—Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T—against each other in a high-congestion environment (a stadium with 41,000 fans). The results are not a simple "winner and loser" story. They are a case study in volatility and a worrying indicator that the core promise of 5G capacity remains largely theoretical.
The data from the Wrigley Field test is fascinating not for its averages, but for its extreme outliers. Standing at the front gate, the tester recorded download speeds that were nothing short of spectacular. Verizon 5G clocked an astonishing 2,666 Mbps, with AT&T not far behind at 1,299 Mbps. These are the kinds of numbers that fill marketing brochures. If this was the only data point, one would conclude that the capacity problem has been solved.
But it wasn't the only data point.
Move a few hundred feet to the right-field gate, and the entire system collapses. T-Mobile, which had been posting respectable triple-digit speeds away from the park, delivered a speed of precisely 0 Mbps. It failed to even connect to the server. AT&T’s performance plummeted by 99% to just 8.55 Mbps. Only Verizon remained functional, though its speed dropped by 97% to a modest 70.3 Mbps.
This wild oscillation is the entire story. The network experience wasn't just slow; it was fundamentally unreliable. At one moment, you have a firehose of data. In the next, you can't even send a text message. I've analyzed performance metrics across various asset classes, and this level of volatility would be unacceptable anywhere else. Imagine if your electricity worked perfectly 50% of the time and failed completely the other 50%. You wouldn't call that a success.
The entire 5G project feels like a new highway system built with a few glorious, 12-lane stretches that inexplicably narrow down to a single dirt track with no warning. The peak speed is irrelevant if you can't depend on the road to get you to your destination. What good is a theoretical 2 Gbps connection if, 30 minutes later at the same event, the network can’t even run a speed test?
This inconsistency becomes even more perplexing when you consider the underlying technology carriers are currently deploying. Just this week, AT&T announced the nationwide activation of its "standalone" 5G network—a development detailed in AT&T Switches on Standalone 5G Nationwide, Unlocking Future Network Slice Services—which unchains the service from its 4G LTE predecessor. Verizon says it's at a similar stage. This is a crucial architectural upgrade. Standalone 5G is the key that is supposed to unlock advanced features like "network slicing"—creating dedicated, reliable lanes of traffic for specific high-priority uses. In theory, a carrier could create a slice for a stadium to guarantee a certain level of performance.
And this is the part of the report that I find genuinely puzzling. The carriers are actively rolling out the very technology designed to solve the capacity and reliability problem, yet the real-world user experience in a crowded venue remains a game of chance. The ZDNET test, while not a perfectly controlled lab experiment, is a powerful anecdotal data set. It reflects what an actual customer would experience.
The methodological purist in me has to question the setup: it's one person with three phones, moving around the outside of the stadium. What happens inside, where the density is even greater? The data we have is likely a best-case scenario for a congested environment. The fact that T-Mobile failed completely on two separate occasions, and AT&T’s download test timed out after 12 minutes, suggests the networks are still incredibly brittle under load.
This raises a fundamental question the carriers seem reluctant to answer directly: Is the inconsistent performance a result of incomplete standalone 5G deployment, or does the technology itself have practical limitations that marketing narratives have conveniently ignored? Are we simply hitting the limits of physics when 41,000 transceivers are screaming for bandwidth in the same square mile?
The carriers talk about a future of innovation built on these new networks. AT&T’s CTO vaguely touts “the next wave of innovation, creativity, and connection.” But if the network can't reliably handle the "old wave" of innovation—like uploading a video from a baseball game—how can we trust it with something more critical? The foundation appears to be built on shifting sand.
Let's strip away the hype and look at the final tally. Over the course of the test, Verizon’s download speed never once dropped into the single digits. T-Mobile, on the other hand, hit single digits (or zero) on three separate occasions. When it came to consistency, Verizon was the clear outperformer, though even its performance varied by over 2,500 Mbps depending on location.
The promise of 5G capacity wasn't just about enabling everyone to stream simultaneously. It was about creating a utility-grade service—something that works with predictable reliability, like water or electricity. Based on this real-world data, 5G internet in crowded spaces is not a utility. It's a lottery. And for the user who paid for a ticket and just wants to send a video to their family, that’s a promise unfulfilled.