Although 5G plans are not officially out yet, Starhub is jumping the gun and posted a map of areas where you can experience Starhub’s 5G network.
This came as no surprise as one of our readers submitted a story to us last week that he was able to login to M1’s 5G network at Jurong West.
We suspect the Starhub is probably also using Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS) to upgrade 4G base stations to serve 5G sharing the allocated existing bands as 5G with Carrier aggregation. It is supposedly a NSA running on Band 1 (2.1 GHz) which is not really the 3.6 GHz of 5G.
If you are a Starhub user and own a 5G Smartphone – Huawei P40 Pro, Huawei P40 Pro+ 5G, Samsung Galaxy S20Ultra 5G, OPPO Find X2 Pro (or possibly other 5G phones with the band support) and sign up for the following plans :
The plans are rather expensive I would say if I were to experience it first hand how “Speedy” 5G is. I suspect it won’t be any much better than a 4G multi band carrier aggregation.
“StarHub’s 5G is built based on a 5G non-standalone (NSA) network using the 2.1Ghz spectrum. The NSA mode of deploying 5G focuses on enhancing existing mobile broadband to provide higher data-bandwidth and reliable connectivity. This is vastly adopted by mobile network operators around the world, including StarHub.”
So, will you sign up for the plan to test it out? Comment below.