5G

Most people know 5G as the icon in the corner of the screen, and take it to mean faster downloads. Speed is the smallest part of it. What changed between 4G and 5G is the network underneath, which is why the same plan can be slow in a lift lobby and quick on a crowded MRT platform an hour later.

That gap costs you money. Plenty of people pay for a 5G plan, keep an old SIM or a phone bought overseas, and never see the performance they expected. Three things decide whether you're on the full version: the plan, the SIM and the handset. None of them show up on a plan page.

What Is 5G?

5G is the fifth generation of mobile network technology, and it improves three things at once: speed, latency and capacity.

Latency, the delay between your phone asking for something and the network starting to answer, is the one to understand first, because it is the change you actually feel. On 4G that delay is measured in tens of milliseconds. The 5G specification targets about one millisecond, against the IMT-2020 requirements it was written to. A real standalone connection lands in single figures to low double figures. Downloads get quicker on 5G, but the difference between a video call where everyone keeps interrupting each other and one that runs smoothly is latency.

The third improvement is capacity, and in Singapore it matters more than either of the other two. Network congestion is not really about speed, it is about how many devices one cell can serve at once. 5G was designed for a hundredfold increase in traffic capacity, which is what a city of high-rise offices and packed trains demands of a mobile network.

How 5G Works

5G works by pairing new radio equipment with a new network core, and both halves have to be present before the technology behaves the way the specification promises.

The radio side transmits across a much wider spread of frequencies than 4G ever used. The core side is the software brain: it routes your traffic, authenticates your SIM and decides how quickly to respond. Operators can upgrade those two pieces separately, which is why two phones both showing 5G can be having very different experiences.

Low-Band, Mid-Band and mmWave

5G runs on three broad slices of spectrum.

• Low-band, below 1GHz: the longest reach and the best at passing through walls, floors and tunnels, at the cost of capacity. This is the layer that fixes indoor coverage.
• Mid-band, roughly 1GHz to 6GHz: the compromise that carries most of the world's consumer 5G traffic, including Singapore's. Good speed, useful range, workable indoors.
• High-band, or mmWave, from around 24GHz upwards: enormous capacity and the headline speeds, over very short distances, and it struggles to get through a window. It suits dense hotspots and venues.

Which Spectrum Singapore's 5G Runs On

A great deal of the 5G writing you will find online is American, and American consumer 5G leans heavily on mmWave. That framing does not transfer. Singapore's 5G runs on mid-band, with low-band added underneath it to reach the places mid-band cannot, and mmWave plays almost no part in what people here actually get.

5G Standalone and Non-Standalone

Non-standalone 5G attaches 5G radios to the existing 4G core. You get the extra download speed, and almost none of the latency improvement, because every request still goes through 4G machinery to be handled. Most countries started here because it is faster and cheaper to deploy.

Standalone 5G replaces the core as well, so the whole path from your handset to the internet is 5G. That is what delivers the low latency, the capacity gains and network slicing, where an operator reserves a defined share of the network for one particular use.

Singapore decided in 2019 to build standalone networks directly and skip the non-standalone shortcut, and StarHub closed its last non-standalone network in May 2026. Opensignal reported in July 2026 that M1 and StarHub had completed the move to standalone, while Singtel still carried a proportion of customers on the older configuration. If you are on a Singapore 5G plan today, you are on the full version. In plenty of other countries 5G still runs on a 4G core, so the badge shows up without the response times behind it. It also explains a requirement that confuses people: standalone 5G needs a SIM that supports it, not just a handset that does.

What 5G Is Used For

For most people 5G earns its place on ordinary things: a video call that holds up away from Wi-Fi, cloud gaming, uploading rather than only downloading, and tethering a laptop without hunting for a cafe connection. What you notice is not a faster download. It is that the connection behaves the same in a crowd as it does on an empty street.

The larger uses are the ones that justified building the network in the first place. Singapore's standalone networks were rolled out with industry in mind, including the maritime sector out in the anchorages, urban mobility, healthcare and manufacturing, where low latency and network slicing let machines and sensors work off a mobile network in real time. Those use cases are why the country skipped the non-standalone shortcut, and consumers here ended up with the better version as a result.

5G vs 4G

The Singapore government's own explainer puts 5G at around ten times faster than 4G. The gap is widest on the measures people never think to check.

• Everyday download speed: Opensignal measured 5G in Singapore at around 300 Mbps in July 2026, with mobile connections overall averaging between 147 and 173 Mbps. Mbps is megabits per second, a measure of how fast data arrives rather than how quickly the network responds, and at 300 Mbps a 4GB film downloads in roughly two minutes. A good 4G connection lands in the tens of Mbps.
• Latency: tens of milliseconds on 4G, single figures on standalone 5G. This is the difference in video calls, cloud gaming and anything live.
• Capacity: 4G cells were planned for phones. 5G cells were planned for phones plus everything else, which is why a 5G network holds up in a crowd where 4G buckles.
• Upload: consistently the forgotten half. Uploads matter for video calls, live streams and backing up photos, and 5G is substantially better at them.

How Fast Is 5G in Singapore?

In everyday use, expect a few hundred megabits per second, which is the range those Opensignal figures sit in. Peak specification figures reach 20 Gbps in the downlink. Nobody will ever see that on a phone. Those numbers describe the ceiling of the technology across all spectrum, not what a handset gets on a mid-band network in Orchard Road. LTE is the technical name for 4G. For more on how the two generations behave when your phone moves between them, there is a fuller comparison in LTE vs 5G.

5G Coverage in Singapore

Singapore has some of the most complete 5G coverage anywhere, and coverage is also the part of a mobile plan people check last, which is the subject of Wide Coverage and Network with giga. The first two standalone 5G networks passed 95% outdoor coverage nationwide in 2022. Singapore was also the first country to take standalone 5G out to sea, in August 2022, covering the waters where the port operates.

By December 2025 IMDA counted just over 3.1 million 5G subscriptions, roughly a third of all mobile lines against a base of 9.83 million. So coverage is no longer the question here. What is left are not gaps on a map but gaps inside buildings: basement car parks, lift shafts, MRT tunnels and the inner corridors of older blocks. Mid-band spectrum runs out of energy in those places before it runs out of distance. Low-band 5G was added to solve exactly that, which is why Singapore operators have been putting 700MHz into their networks. The licence conditions are unusually specific about where it has to reach. IMDA names the whole island including MRT underground stations and lines and road tunnels, the offshore islands, and territorial waters out to 15km from the coast.

A second kind of coverage matters too: your own handset. A set bought overseas may work perfectly on 5G in its home market and still miss the bands a Singapore network uses, or the standalone configuration.

The Future of 5G in Singapore

5G is not finished. The standard keeps developing, and its current phase, 5G-Advanced, began with 3GPP Release 18. The named priorities are energy efficiency, artificial intelligence and machine learning inside the network, and immersive communications for extended and augmented reality.

For a consumer here the nearer-term changes are smaller and more useful. More spectrum is going into existing networks to improve indoor and underground coverage. More of the network is being sliced, so priority can be given to the traffic that needs it, which is how a live video call or a payment terminal stays steady while everything else on the same cell carries on around it. 5G-Advanced is a formal step in the standard. A telco's "plus" or "ultra" branding is not, and the two get confused constantly.

What You Need for 5G

A 5G Phone

Any phone sold in Singapore as a 5G handset in recent years will connect to 5G, but two details decide whether you get the full experience. The first is standalone support, since a handset built for non-standalone 5G will connect and still miss the latency benefit. The second is the bands it covers, particularly the low-band spectrum operators use for indoor coverage.

This is where imported and second-hand handsets catch people out. A phone bought in the United States, Hong Kong or Japan may cover a different mix of bands. No warning appears when it settles for less. Check the model's supported bands against the ones used here, and keep the firmware current, because standalone support has arrived in software updates on several models.

A 5G SIM or eSIM

Standalone 5G needs a SIM profile that supports it. Global guides will tell you a new SIM is unnecessary for 5G. On non-standalone networks that is true, which is exactly why the advice misleads readers here. On an older 4G SIM you can hold a 5G plan and a 5G phone and still not get standalone 5G.

An eSIM solves this in minutes, because the profile is delivered over the air instead of by post. All giga plans are eSIM-enabled, so a new line can be live on 5G without waiting for anything to arrive. If you are weighing the two formats, the practical differences are set out in eSIM vs Physical SIM.

Choosing a 5G Plan in Singapore

Two plans with the same number of gigabytes can behave completely differently.

• What happens to unused data: some plans wipe it at the end of every cycle, others roll it forward. Over a year that is the difference between paying for data you never touched and keeping it.
• Where the data works: a plan's base data may be usable in Singapore only, or across several countries. That is not the same thing as a roaming allowance. Base data is the main allowance you spend every day, and where it is allowed to travel is often buried in the fine print, while a roaming allowance is a separate pot of data for trips abroad.
• Roaming, included or sold separately: some plans include roaming data every month. Others sell it to you per trip, which costs more and needs remembering. If you are unsure how your line behaves the moment you land, start with data roaming.
• Prepaid or postpaid: prepaid plans need topping up and any banked data usually dies when you forget. Postpaid plans renew themselves.
• Contract length: SIM-only plans in Singapore are commonly contract-free, so being locked in for two years is a choice, not a requirement.
• Billing period shape: monthly plans reset monthly. Six-month plans can release the whole entitlement pool at the start, which suits uneven usage.

You can compare giga's 5G plans against that list directly. Not every telco treats 5G speed as a flat service, since at least one Singapore operator sells tiered and time-limited speed boosts on top of a 5G plan. On giga it is flat. Every 5G plan gets the same network, and what differs is the allowance, where the base data works, and what is bundled.

Why Choose giga?

We run on StarHub's 5G standalone network, so coverage is settled before you even start comparing. The rest is the part we enjoy: giving you more than you paid for.

Free Rollover Data on Every Plan

Unused data does not expire. Whatever you do not use rolls into the next cycle on every giga plan, 4G and 5G, up to the size of your plan. Monthly plans carry data for two renewal cycles, so a heavy month can draw on a quiet one. The 6-month plans hand you the whole entitlement pool on day one and roll it for one cycle.

Rollover data carries the same destinations as your base data, so it does not shrink when it changes cycle. On the 300GB and 400GB plans that means Singapore and Malaysia. On gigaFLEX+ and the 1.4TB and 2TB plans it stretches to Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

5G+ on Every giga 5G Plan

5G+ adds 700MHz low-band spectrum to the 5G network, which is the part of the airwaves that travels furthest and passes through concrete best. StarHub switched it on across its 5G mobile plans on 1 September 2026, and we've now launched it on every giga 5G plan. The gain shows up where 5G has always been weakest: lift lobbies, basement car parks, MRT platforms, the middle of a crowded mall. There is no add-on to buy and no different SIM to order.

Nationwide 5G Standalone Coverage

giga runs on a 5G standalone network, meaning the 5G core and not just 5G radios bolted onto a 4G core, which is the version that delivers the low latency 5G was designed for. StarHub also closed the last non-standalone network here in May 2026, so there is no older layer to fall back to.

We would rather send you to Opensignal than quote ourselves. In its July 2026 Singapore report, StarHub won both overall speed awards outright, download and upload, taking the upload award with an increase of more than 20% on the previous report.

Free Roaming Data on Every Plan

Roaming data is included every month, permanently. Every plan carries free Asia roaming, and from gigaFLEX+ upwards Asia Roam now reaches 24 destinations instead of five. Every 5G plan from 400GB upwards adds free international roaming across 48 destinations on top of that, and both allowances refresh every month.

Those 24 Asia Roam destinations are:

• Southeast Asia: Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Brunei
• East Asia: China, Hong Kong, Macao, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan
• South Asia: India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka
• Oceania: Australia and New Zealand
• Further afield: Canada, Qatar, Israel, Turkey and Russia

giga roaming is data only, with no roaming call or SMS packs on the plan. Incoming SMS is free in more than 230 destinations, which covers the one-time passcodes most people worry about. Outside the included list, gigaRoam packs activate on their own at 1GB for $5 across 14 APAC countries, or 1GB for $15 across 48 destinations.

The giga App, gigaSurprises and Monthly Giveaways

Signing up takes three steps in the giga app, activation is one tap, and support runs as a 24/7 chat. You never have to leave the house to join us.

The app is also where the giveaways land, and they are things you actually receive. gigaSurprises are unannounced data top-ups, including extra data on your birthday and on random Mondays. Refer a friend and you get $6 in gigaBucks, with no cap on how many times you can do it. Your friend gets $6 off their first month. gigaBucks come off your next bill.

How to Switch to giga and Port Over Your Number

You keep your number. How to switch to giga is four steps, none of them involving a shop. Choose Port-in Number at sign-up, your SIM or eSIM arrives on a temporary number, the port-over goes through the next working day, and you activate in the giga app. IMDA counted 60,800 subscribers moving network and keeping their number in December 2025.

How to port over to giga without a gap is mostly timing. Keep the old SIM in the phone until the port completes, and the old line then closes on its own. No contract, no lock-in.

Free gigaAI and Bubble Tea on gigaFLEX+

gigaFLEX+ is the plan we build around 5G itself, carrying 800GB, base data that works in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, and no restriction on who can buy it. gigaAI comes with it at no extra cost: unlimited tokens and web searches a month, up to 300 images and 10 deep research runs. A free bubble tea every month comes with it, which is not a 5G feature, but nobody else puts it in a mobile plan.

FAQs

Is 5G more expensive than 4G in Singapore?

Barely. 5G plans start a little above the entry 4G plans, and the government's own explainer notes that some operators here price them the same. On a SIM-only plan you are paying for the allowance and what comes with it, not for network access.

Can I use 5G when I travel overseas?

Sometimes. It depends on whether the roaming partner has 5G where you are, whether your plan's allowance covers that destination, and whether your handset supports the bands used there. Band mismatch is the usual reason a phone falls back to 4G abroad. Free monthly roaming data across 48 destinations comes with every giga 5G plan from 400GB upwards, and gigaRoam packs activate automatically if you land somewhere outside that list.

Is 5G safe?

Yes, on the evidence available. 5G uses radio frequencies covered by the same ICNIRP guidelines as 4G and Wi-Fi, and the 2020 revision of those guidelines was written to cover 5G specifically. Measured exposure in Singapore runs at about 0.7% of the limit.

Can 5G replace my home broadband?

For some households, yes. It handles streaming, video calls and working from home with no installation appointment. Fibre here is cheap and almost universal, though, so 5G works best as an interim line: a rental you will leave, or a new place waiting for fibre.

Is 5G good for gaming?

Yes, and latency is the reason. Standalone 5G answers in single-digit to low double-digit milliseconds, which is what competitive and cloud gaming need. It still varies more than a fixed line, and it gets through data quickly.

Does 5G work on a tablet or a laptop?

Yes, if the device has its own 5G modem and a SIM or eSIM. Otherwise tether from your phone. For a second device that needs its own always-on connection, a data-only plan costs less than a second full line, and giga customers can add gigaBuddy for one.

Does 5G use more battery than 4G?

Not really. Standalone 5G is more power-efficient than the non-standalone version, because the phone is not holding a 4G connection at the same time. Most drain comes from a weak signal rather than from 5G itself.

Why does my phone switch between 5G and 4G?

Because it picks the best available connection several times a minute, which is normal. Move into a basement or a tunnel and you leave the range of higher-frequency 5G. If it almost never shows 5G where others do, check whether your SIM supports standalone 5G.

Does 5G use more data?

Not by itself. A gigabyte is a gigabyte whichever generation carries it. What changes is behaviour: a connection that works away from Wi-Fi gets used more, and video apps step up to a higher resolution when the network allows it.

How do I know if my phone is using 5G?

Check the status bar, though what it shows varies by manufacturer and software version. A phone can show 5G on a weak signal, so for a real check use the network details in your phone's status or engineering menu.