LTE vs 5G
Your phone flips between 5G and LTE all day without telling you, and most of the time you'd never know the difference. That's worth knowing before you pay extra for either. In Singapore, 6.67 million of the 9.83 million mobile subscriptions were still on 4G in December 2025, which is two thirds of the country. So no, you haven't been left behind on some ancient network.
There is a real gap though, and it turns up in specific moments: when everyone around you reaches for their phone at once, when you're uploading instead of scrolling, and when something has to respond right now. The question is whether those are your moments. This guide covers how they really differ, what each one does on a Singapore network in 2026, and how to pick the right one for your phone.
LTE vs 5G: Which is Better?
On paper, 5G wins comfortably. The targets are set by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN agency that decides what each new generation has to achieve. It asked 5G for a top download speed of 20 Gbit/s, or gigabits per second. It also asked for a response time as short as 1 millisecond. That 1 millisecond applies to the version of 5G built for factory machines, not to phones. LTE just had to stay under 10 milliseconds. And the 1 Gbit/s figure you often see for LTE was only ever a research goal. No LTE network has ever got near it.
Those are laboratory targets, and you don't live in a laboratory. In July 2026, Opensignal measured 5G in Singapore at around 300 Mbps, or megabits per second. Mobile connections overall came in at 147 to 173 Mbps. So 5G gives you roughly double what most people get today. That's a real upgrade, and it's nothing like the ten-fold jump those headline numbers suggest.
What matters more is whether you'd notice. If your phone life is messaging, maps, music, social feeds and the odd stream, LTE handles all of it. If you upload videos, tether a laptop, game competitively or travel in a crowd every day, 5G earns the few extra dollars.
Key Differences
LTE and 5G differ in six ways that show up on your phone: speed, latency, capacity, the technology behind them, the spectrum they use, and coverage.
Speed
Downloading and scrolling feel much the same on either network, which is why most people never notice which one they're on. Uploads are where the gap opens up. If you back up photos while you're out, or you stream live on social, that's where 5G saves you real waiting.
Latency
Latency is the lag between your phone asking for something and the network starting to answer. LTE was built to keep that under 10 milliseconds. 5G aims for 4 on a normal phone connection. Real networks miss both targets, and Ookla put Singapore's median at 16 milliseconds in July 2026. 5G's still the quicker of the two day to day. Pages start loading the moment you tap, and video calls stop everyone talking over each other.
Capacity
Capacity is the difference most people actually feel. 5G was built to hold up to a million devices in every square kilometre. That's about ten times what LTE can carry. It explains why your phone crawls at a packed concert, or on the platform at Raffles Place when a train empties out, even with full bars. Full bars tell you the signal is strong. Whether the tower still has room for you is a different question, and on LTE it runs out much sooner.
Technology
Every mobile network has two halves: the radio masts your phone talks to, and the core network behind them that checks who you are and sends your data on. LTE uses a radio and a core that were both designed for 4G. 5G can be built in two ways. The non-standalone version adds new 5G radios to the old 4G core. You get some of the extra speed, but the response time barely changes. The standalone version replaces the core too, and it's the only version that delivers everything 5G promised. Singapore went straight to full standalone 5G from 2019, skipping the non-standalone shortcut. StarHub retired its last non-standalone network in May 2026, so 5G here runs on a core built for the job.
Spectrum
Spectrum is the range of radio frequencies a network is allowed to use. 5G uses a much wider range of it than LTE. LTE in Singapore runs mainly on low frequencies. These travel a long way and pass through walls easily, but they carry less data. 5G adds higher frequencies that carry far more data, and those struggle to get past a wall or across a street. That's why your 5G icon often hands back to LTE in a lift lobby or a basement carpark.
Coverage
Coverage means two different things. The first is reach, and that one is already settled. Singapore's first two standalone 5G networks hit 95% outdoor coverage nationwide back in 2022, and LTE has covered the island for over a decade. The second is how much of your day you actually spend on each network. Here LTE is still doing plenty of the work. Opensignal puts 5G availability at 79.9% on Singtel, 70% on StarHub and 67% on M1. So even on a 5G plan, you spend a fifth to a third of your time on LTE.
What is LTE?
LTE stands for Long Term Evolution, the fourth-generation standard that's carried Singapore since the early 2010s. In everyday use, 4G and LTE mean the same thing, and this article treats them as interchangeable.
Technically they aren't identical. The ITU set 100 Mbps as the bar for real 4G, and early LTE fell short of it. That is why the industry invented LTE-Advanced, and why you see that awkward "4G LTE" label on your status bar.
LTE is still doing most of the work in Singapore. Singapore's regulator, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), counted 6,667,000 4G subscriptions in December 2025, against 3,164,500 on 5G. LTE also picked up the last of the 3G users. M1 closed its 3G network on 1 August 2024, and Singtel and StarHub followed that November. Those customers moved onto LTE, which is a big part of why 4G numbers stay so high.
How Does LTE Work?
Your phone talks by radio to the nearest tower. That tower passes your traffic to the core network, which checks who you are, applies your plan's rules and sends your data on its way.
LTE chops the spectrum into narrow slices and shares them between users moment by moment. Walk around, and your connection hands off from tower to tower without dropping. It was built to give one phone a fast connection, and it still does that well.
What Is 5G?
5G is the fifth generation of mobile network, written up by 3GPP, the industry body that draws up mobile standards. It was designed to do three jobs at once. The first is to carry far more data to each phone. The second is to answer requests fast enough for live video and remote control. The third is to keep huge numbers of devices connected in one place, from phones in a crowd to sensors across a whole building.
No network delivers all three at their headline figures at the same time, and none was ever meant to.
How Does 5G Work?
The radio side of 5G is called 5G New Radio. It uses wider channels and many more antennas than LTE. A 4G tower might carry four antennas. A 5G base station packs in 64 or more, an arrangement called Massive MIMO, short for multiple input multiple output. It also uses beamforming, which aims a narrow beam at each phone it is serving. One tower can then serve many more people on the same spectrum.
The core network behind the radios is the bigger leap. A standalone 5G core is built from software, so an operator can move capacity around without anyone driving out to a tower. It can also split the network into separate virtual lanes for different uses, which the industry calls network slicing. Your phone benefits too. It wakes from standby faster than it does on LTE, which trims the delay before a page loads and saves a little battery.
Types of 5G
The band your phone grabs explains most of the difference between two 5G connections standing in the same street.
Low-Band
Low-band runs below roughly 1 GHz, which here means 700 MHz. It reaches furthest and gets through walls best, so it's what keeps 5G alive indoors and in basements. It's the slowest of the three, but coverage is the whole point.
Mid-Band
Mid-band sits between roughly 1 GHz and 6 GHz, which is where Singapore's 3.5 GHz allocation lives. It's the sweet spot: far more capacity than low-band, with enough reach to blanket a dense city. Almost all the 5G speed you enjoy here comes from mid-band.
mmWave
Millimetre wave uses very high frequencies, 26 and 28 GHz locally, and it's the fastest 5G gets. It also stops dead at walls, so it works as venue-level capacity, the kind you'd find inside a stadium.
In Singapore it's academic anyway. Apple only puts millimetre wave hardware in United States iPhone models, from the iPhone 12 through to the iPhone 17. Handsets sold here are sub-6 GHz only. If you bought your iPhone in Singapore, you've never used mmWave, and you're not missing much.
Applications and Use Cases
For messaging, email, maps, music and social feeds, LTE is plenty, and always has been. Streaming is comfortable on it too. If that's your phone life, 5G won't change your day.
5G pulls ahead in four situations:
- Crowded places: capacity runs out before speed does, so an LTE cell starts buckling while 5G keeps serving.
- Uploading: this is where the gap between the two is widest.
- Anything that hates lag: competitive gaming, cloud gaming and video calls.
- Tethering: when one connection has to feed your laptop and your tablet at once.
5G also does jobs LTE was never asked to do, like running port equipment remotely or wiring a whole building with sensors.
Which Should I Choose, LTE or 5G?
Start with how you actually use your phone. If your use is light to moderate, mostly watching and reading, a 4G plan will look after you and cost less. If the four situations above describe your average week, 5G is worth the extra few dollars.
Price isn't the wall it used to be. At giga!, our mobile plans start at $10.90 a month for 100GB on 4G and $15.90 for 300GB on 5G, so there are a few dollars between them. Both come with free rollover data, neither ties you to a contract, and switching plan later costs you nothing.
One thing to check first: your phone needs to support 5G. Anything older than roughly 2020 probably doesn't, and no plan can fix that.
When LTE Is Still the Better Choice
LTE is the right answer more often than you'd think. Choose it if your data use is modest and predictable, or if you mostly stream and browse. It also suits you if you want the smallest monthly bill, without giving up rollover or roaming. It's the sensible pick when you're buying for a parent or a child, where reliability matters more than peak speed. Our 200GB 4G plan carries a "recommended for seniors" badge for that reason.
Phones are built to prefer 5G whenever they can see it. So in a spot with weak 5G and strong LTE, your phone may hang on to the weaker signal and run slower. Battery matters less than people expect. Ookla found 5G drew 6% to 11% more than LTE depending on the chipset, and that was back in 2023, with newer chips closing the gap.
Is LTE Being Phased Out?
No, and nobody has announced a date. IMDA's December 2025 statistics show 4G carrying 67.8% of every mobile subscription in Singapore, which isn't something you switch off. The 700 MHz spectrum rights handed out in November 2024 cover 4G as well as 5G.
The 3G shutdown shows how much notice to expect. By the time IMDA retired 3G in 2024, over 99.9% of subscribers had already moved on. LTE is nowhere near that, and won't be for years.
Why Choose giga?
Powered by Singapore's Fastest Network
giga runs on StarHub's network, and Opensignal's July 2026 Singapore report is where that pays off. StarHub took the country's fastest overall download at 172.7 Mbps and the fastest upload at 25.3 Mbps. It also took the best video experience score, 74.3 out of 100, and finished with seven awards. Singtel took more awards overall and kept the Best Network title, and we'll say so plainly. It's a close race.
It's a 5G standalone network too, running on a core built for 5G, which is what makes the low latency real on every giga 5G plan.
Free Data Rollover
Unused data shouldn't just evaporate, so we don't let it. We roll it over for another two renewal cycles, up to your plan's own allowance. So a plan can hold double its headline data at any one time.
Rollover covers the same destinations as your base data: Singapore and Malaysia on our 5G plans, and Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand on gigaFLEX+. It applies to local data, so roaming allowances stay where they are.
gigaSurprise, Birthday Treats and the giga App
Everything to do with your giga line lives in one app. You sign up there, activate your line, watch your data, top up roaming and change your plan. Changing plan is free, and there is no shop to visit and no queue to sit through. We also upgrade plans without being asked, so when a plan gets better, you get the better version.
The app is where the free stuff turns up. gigaSurprise is our name for the extras we drop into your app on random days through the year. You get no warning, and there is nothing to claim. It might be free roaming data, free SMS or free talk time, and we run giveaways on social with the brands we work with every month on top of that.
Birthday treats are the same idea, on your birthday. Free data, free SMS and free talk time land in your app as a present, and you never have to ask for them.
How to Switch to giga and Port Over Your Number
Switching to giga takes minutes, and porting over doesn't mean giving up your number. Pick Port-in Number when you sign up. Your SIM arrives with a temporary number, so you are never cut off. We process the port the next working day, and your real number moves across.
No giga plan charges you for going over your data, so nothing turns up on your bill that you didn't choose. Referrals pay too, at $6 in gigaBucks per friend who signs up with your code, plus $6 off their first month.
gigaFLEX+ With gigaAI, Open to Everyone
If you're making the jump to 5G, gigaFLEX+ is the one to look at. It's open to everyone, with no age limit. You get 800GB to use across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, rising to 1.6TB with rollover. You also get 1,000 minutes of talk time and 1,000 SMS.
gigaAI comes free with it. That's one subscription covering ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and more, with unlimited tokens and unlimited web searches. You also get up to 300 images and 10 deep research runs a month. There's a free PlayMade bubble tea every month on top, because why not.
Free International Roaming on All 5G Plans
Every giga plan comes with free monthly Asia roaming, and our 5G plans add free international roaming across 48 destinations. Both are permanent parts of the plan. Our six-month plans hand you the whole pool up front, so you can spend it however suits you across the six months.
If you need more, our data roaming plans add 1GB for $5 across 14 Asia-Pacific countries for five days. There is also 1GB for $15 across 48 destinations for fifteen days. Either way, they switch themselves on when you land.
No Contracts or Hidden Fees
No contracts, no lock-ins, no early termination fees. You won't be charged for going over your data either, because we don't bill pay-as-you-go, so there's no nasty surprise at month end. Every plan supports eSIM too, so you're connected without waiting for anything in the post.
FAQs
Are LTE and 5G the same?
No. They're two different generations of mobile network, and your phone moves between them automatically depending on what it can reach. You don't switch between them yourself, and on a 5G plan you'll spend part of every day on LTE without noticing.
How much faster is 5G than LTE?
In Singapore, Opensignal measured 5G downloads at roughly 295 to 305 Mbps in July 2026, against overall speeds of 147 to 173 Mbps. So expect about double what you get today. The 20 Gbit/s you see quoted is a laboratory peak that no phone has ever reached.
What are the disadvantages of 5G compared to LTE?
Mid-band and millimetre wave 5G don't get through buildings as well as low-band LTE, so indoor coverage can be patchy. It uses a bit more battery, and you need a handset that supports it.
Does 5G use more data than LTE?
An hour of video costs the same on either network. The difference comes from your own habits, because 5G is quicker, so people stream in higher quality and download more, and monthly usage creeps up. Free rollover on every giga plan means whatever you don't use isn't wasted.
Do 5G phones still work on LTE networks?
Yes. Every 5G phone drops back to LTE wherever 5G isn't available, with nothing for you to switch on. Opensignal's July 2026 figures show people spending 67% to 79.9% of their time on 5G, so LTE is doing the rest.
Can an LTE-only phone get 5G?
No. 5G needs a 5G modem inside the handset, so no software update, new plan or new SIM will conjure it up. On an LTE-only phone, a 5G plan simply runs at LTE speeds. Handsets from roughly 2020 onwards generally support 5G, and every giga plan is eSIM-enabled if you'd rather not wait for a physical SIM.
Should I leave my phone on 5G or LTE?
Leave it on 5G if your handset and plan support it, and let the phone choose for itself. It drops back to LTE on its own whenever 5G is weak or unavailable. There is one exception. In a place where 5G is weak but LTE is strong, like a particular basement or building, your phone may hang on to the weak 5G and run slower. If one spot is reliably sluggish, switch that phone to LTE only while you're there, and switch it back afterwards in your settings.