Australian 5G Phone Showdown: Which Model Is Fastest?

Telstra and Optus are in the throes of rolling out their respective 5G networks and a number of smartphone makers are already pushing their new handsets, hoping to grab the first early adopters. At a string of events at Telstra’s flagship store in Sydney, three handsets were put to the test to find Australia’s fastest 5G handset. Here’s what happened.

It’s important to note that the rollout of 5G is still in its early days. But that doesn’t mean buying a 5G heandset is a waste of time. At the launch of Infosys’ new 5G Living Lab – a testing centre for commercial and industrial 5G applications – Telstra’s CTO Hakan Eriksson said the latest 5G handsets are also the best 4G smartphones on the market.

With that said, the test results at the Sydney event were achieved on a network with very few users and in conditions that were likely optimised to ensure the best possible outcomes. So, while the raw numbers are interesting, they don’t tell us how the phones perform on a busy network, But they remain useful as a basic speed comparison between the three handsets that were tested.

For context, Telstra’s existing mobile network reports average download speeds of 53.42Mbps and average upload speeds of 17.53Mbps on Ookla Speed Test.

Samsung Galaxy S10 5G

Samsung got the jump on most of its competition when it announced the Galaxy S10 5G in the lead up to MWC earlier this year.

During the testing, the Galaxy S10 5G clicked downloads speeds of 1.2Gbps and upload speeds of 63.6Mbps.

Here are the available plans you can get right now:

Samsung Galaxy S10 5G 256GB

Samsung Galaxy S10 5G 512GB

Oppo Reno 5G

Oppo has officially moved from challenger brand to the big time. The Chinese phone maker is entrenched in the top five phone makers globally and has a good chance of jumping into third position should Huawei’s troubles continue.

Oppo’s 5G flagship, the Reno 5G achieved a download speed of 2Gbps and uploads of about 41Mbps on the 5G network.

Here are the available plans:

Oppo Reno 5G Plans

LG V50 ThinQ 5G

Unlike other foldable devices that Huawei and Samsung have shown off, the LG V50 ThinQ 5G runs two separate displays (one of which is detachable), making it a little different to most of the other handsets we’ve seen.

In its 5G test, the LG V50 ThinQ 5G clocked download speeds of 1.258Gbps and upload speeds of 70.4Mbps.

Here are the available plans:

The king of the hill is…

When it comes to pure download speeds, the Oppo Reno 5G crushed the opposition as the only handset to hit the 2Gbps mark. But it did have the slowest upload speeds.

Although the LG V50 ThinQ 5G was about 10% faster on uploads as the others, that margin isn’t enough to make it a compelling challenger.