T-Mobile's nationwide 5G launches tomorrow. We tested it out (The Daily Charge, 12/5/2019)

Began early. Looked at T-Mobile's shiny new nationwide 5G network. You should find out if it's worth your time and money. Stick around for your DAILY CHARGE. [MUSIC] Good morning and welcome to the DAILY CHARGE. It's Thursday December 5th. I'm Roger Chang. I'm [INAUDIBLE] And I'm [INAUDIBLE] Let's get to today's HEADLINES. TMobile is set to launch this nationwide 5g network tomorrow. Keep in mind this is different from the super fast super limited network it quietly turned on earlier this year. This flavor of 5g offers way more coverage hits about 60% of the country. But the speeds aren't that impressive at Eli, you had a chance to actually test out the network. What did you find? So I've been using it for the last few days on this one plus 17 Pro five to McLaren. It's a name of the game just rolls off the tongue. Totally. Thanks. I can't wait for 2020 is when 5G phones get normal names again, hopefully. And yeah, the experiences late has largely been the same as 4G, at least here in New York. Little so I mean we kind of we talked about this on Monday like the TMobile sort of promised on average 20% increases and speeds which most people aren't really going to get like. Ultimately, is this even worth it? It depends on where you live in some areas like in Hawaii where our colleague Jessica court has been covering the Qualcomm conference, she got speeds over 250 megabits per second over 5g were Granted. This was at the backyard of a conference sponsored by Qualcomm, one of the IP companies out there Nintendos are inside all this. So you can imagine every single tool that they pulled out of the tool box. [CROSSTALK] If you want a perfectly optimized network, you'll probably find it there. Right. So that's a big caveat. So let's all fly to Maui. That's it. That's your answer. For a lot of people, at least right now, it's not going to change their world it's not going to be the crazy super fast speeds that you see with verizon where its over a gigabit per second. Right. But At the same point in time you can actually use this inside you don't have to be on a street corner in you know New York city or you know LA or one of the other 18 cities>> right>> so right now>> so how do i download more 5g>> [LAUGH] how do you download more 5g? That's a great question. The quick answer is you give your wireless carrier lots of money and you get a new phone. Okay, that's good to know. That's a really simple step actually. Yeah. It's just $900 for this OnePlus 7T Pro 5G McLaren. It's [UNKNOWN] again, simple name. $1,300 if you want the Galaxy Note 10 Plus. To a lot both of these phones until tomorrow Friday December 6th. We kind of knock the speed boost because I mean you did get some speeds that were actually progressive. I think there was an image of you with 100 megabits per second. Yes. Clock speed at the summer [CROSSTALK] Speeds that I was able to replicate on a Galaxy S10 5G on T-Mobile 4G network that S10 5G. Can use 5G when I'm using millimeter wave Right Which is a higher frequency type of 5G that TMobile has Verizon has Verizon has and at&t has. T Mobile only has it live in about six cities right now, including New York. And when we compare them side by side like I did last night I got over 200 megabits per second with millimeter wave T Mobile 5G compared to 66. And just to clarify things for readers, this is what kind of makes the whole situation crappy is if you buy these new phones are pretty expensive You don't get to access that. The other faster 5g network, you just get the slower 5g network with better coverage but slower, right? Yeah, there are a lot of complications with this early wave of 5g and especially with this batch of phones as you just mentioned. You're very much limited you basically are picking which type of 5g you want. If you want a lot of coverage, you gotta go with this or with the Galaxy Note. If you want the faster speeds and you live in one of those six cities, you'll go with the S10. But what you really should do is wait until next year when phones are expected To support both the low band the millimeter wave as well as sprint's mid band spectrum and sprint of course is trying and team we're trying to complete that merger. Kind of want to answer the question at the beginning of the broadcast so is this worth your time and money?>>If you really want to show your friends that you have a 5G icon on your phone sure and you have 900 or $130 to spend Sure. I want to lose our friend. Otherwise you're really not for the most part going to see much of a difference. You're better off saving your money waiting for the next crop of phones that usually arrived in the spring. Right, I will say the one benefit we saw was indoor coverage, right? Yes. indoor coverage is pretty good. Indoor coverage was a bit faster on this one plus compared to the S10 5g over 4g, 5g was a little bit better, wasn't drastically different. Right. But it was improved. So if you are primarily indoors and T Mobile coverage isn't great, you might get a little bit of a better experience with>> But generally we should probably wait till next year generally wait till next year. All right next up ransomware emergency threat individuals just a few years ago but now scammers are on to bigger targets. Why hit one person we can hold an entire city hostage. Give a nice breakdown on how ransom ware became sort of one of the go to cyber security threats in 2019. Look what you find. Yeah, so ransomware really served as a big wake up call for a lot of cities and over the last year 2018 it started dying down and then in 2019 cyber security companies, were seeing. The issues really spiked. More than 70 cities and local governments have been hit by ransomware attacks. That doesn't just mean the courts or city hall, or anything like that. It could also mean school districts. There's one school district that Just they had to cancel school for the day because they couldn't access their computer network or anything like that. It was it was in Atlanta was the Atlanta was hacked. It was hit in 2018.>> Okay, But I mean Atlanta is a good example of why ransomware had grown so much so We end up paying right Yeah,what No, they didn't pay. So when when Atlanta was hacked in 2018, this was like you couldn't like File that you can pay your water bills online like he had to go down to the courthouse and do it, that kind of stuff. So Atlanta decided we're not going to pay this $50,000 ransom where instead we're going to rebuild our whole city like computer system that costs them like $15 million to do that. Other cities saw that and just saw what we can't afford to do that. So when they get hit by ransom ware they pay But the problem is is that as more cities decide to pay hackers see that and think. Easy target. Yeah. I'm just going to continue to hack [CROSSTALK] Yes Because I can continue making more money. So the ransom demands got higher because of that too. So in the span of 1 week two cities in Florida paid basically one point one million dollars in ransom where. Ransom, I guess or fines, fees, whatever. Because they don't wanna deal with like rebuilding their network. But the problem with that, like I said, If you continue paying them these attacks are gonna continue happening. So now for 2020 so many different local officials, city governments even like Homeland Security Is like trying to figure out a way to prevent this attack from, from continuing the rise it's hard. And is there is there like something I know there's no guarantees of this cyber security but like, what exactly are they doing to protect themselves from ransomware? So the idea is that if you have good backups of everything that you're doing, like even if you're getting hacked by ransomware, which is essentially. They take over your computer, they encrypt all these files and basically if you want the keys to your important files in your computer again, pay us this amount of money. If you have backups of all of it and you have a backup like pretty frequently Then you're not as worried about ransomware right? Like if this computer gets hacked I can just say okay, well I have a backup from three hours ago I don't like need this kind of stuff. The problem is like ransomware is also gotten smarter about that. So they'll They'll wait until like you don't have a backup. Like they can destroy backups too. Well. They can encrypt like the backups. Okay. So like it becomes this whole cat and mouse thing is like well now, I have this backup I'm like an air gap server where like it's not connected online at all. Right. But the thing with that is like, I can't it's not as simple like I would have to take the backup. And then go Physically go to the server and like back it up there instead of doing online. So yeah, backups are usually the key there. And like backing up frequently to make sure that you don't get hacked by this but it's very different for me to backup this one computer versus an entire two cities saying like, we got back everything yeah, twice a day. That's a huge amount of data. Yeah. Yeah. Are they taking over these computers? Is this like Just none strong security update. This is bad IT management. So they'll usually get into a computer network by like somebody on the staff like clicking on an email accidentally or something like that. Just bad security practises. Yeah it's usually like a fishing practise. But the thing is The thing is I don't have to do anything to get infected by it if somebody else in my company did the same thing. Right, it just takes one person. Yeah, cuz you saw with WannaCry back in 2017 the ransomware that hit all these hospitals from North Korea. That it spread throughout the network so if I share files with somebody or I'm on the same WiFi as someone here I can get hit with ransomware even though I did nothing wrong. Well. All right, lastly as part of cnet's decade in review, we looked at the products of diet of the last ten years. The one I personally believe for the most is AOL Instant Messenger since that's, I first started chatting with people online. Do you guys have any products that you're going to miss or Already missing so they're they're long gone. Well before we get into this What was your screen name?>>. [LAUGH] it was wizard two for one was very cheesy I know. [LAUGH] Very, early 90s what do you guys, what do you what do you missing? For me, well, from the last ten years just going through our story there's a lot of surprising a little bit how much has changed since 2010 till now. MoviePass was a nice thing to have. That's a recent one. That's a recent one? But I don't know if you guys subscribe to it. I did. I never did. It was great. For the three months of work-- The early promise of it was amazing. It was too good to be true and it really was too good to be true. Very much so. What about you-- Was another one. Yeah, I guess I miss the rawness. I could really tell like all my blood symptoms from just from one drop>> There you meet the anus>> Whatever. It's dead. I mean in all are like I miss I sincerely Miss like how quiet my inbox was. And like you were not expected to respond to people like past like certain hours and now it's just like like I don't know like That is dead. But you like slack coming on on seen now. I feel like that was dead even ten years ago though. No. I think it's different with like slack now though. Where it's like you expect to respond like even more [INAUDIBLE] I [INAUDIBLE] had a very particular work life balance. You're also very, you're working Ten years ago Cuz it is also true. Cuz ten years ago it wasn't slack it was email and I was responding 24 hours a day. So And it sucks. That was the thing Never stops Yeah that was the thing. Yeah I don't know I can't say I miss any of these products. We all have like functional replacements for all of them. Actually you know what? I kinda miss There was a, not the original Zune, but there was a later version of the Zune. Was it in HD? Yeah. The iPod Touch 1. The iPod Touch 1, it was actually kinda cool. It looked cooler than an iPod, it was thin, and it was kinda the Basis for the Windows Phone which I do kind of like. I choose windows phone. I still have my iPod Nano like the little clip one. Yeah [CROSSTALK] got to the gym. Yeah. It just got to [CROSSTALK] Watch precursor. Yeah basically you look like a leather band on that. Yeah. I just got annoying like synching music to it all the time. Yeah. And I got Spotify like 2 years ago. So. Yeah. Look at you living in. [MUSIC] The modern age. Yeah. There you go. You're [INAUDIBLE] that stuff. [LAUGH] The Daily Charge I'm Roger Cheng. I'm Alfred Ng. I'm Eli Dematha. Thanks for joining us. [MUSIC] Can't get enough? Check out the daily supercharged. Our extended post show with special features, audience Q&A and in depth reviews. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.