5G & Power outage

Does your LTE still work when the 5G drops, or do you lose data completely? Which phone are you using, and is it the whole area or just certain spots?

5G is just a part of the network, it doesn't cover every corner and can be weaker than LTE, so I wonder if your phone is latching onto a weak 5G signal instead of falling back to LTE. What I would try during an outage is setting the preferred network type to LTE/4G only instead of 5G, in the mobile network settings. If the service drops every time the phone picks up 5G, locking it to LTE should at least keep you connected.

If the power goes out in your area and you have a local 5G tower, it could also lose power as well. Most cell towers have backup power that can run for a period of time during power outages, however, 5G equipment drains a lot of power, more so than 4G LTE equipment and 3G.

Because of this, a lot of the time 5G service is either throttled down to save power, reducing it’s speed capabilities, or shut off altogether and switched to only 4G LTE to conserve reserve power at the tower during power outages. This would cause you to have issues connecting to 5G while the power is out. If you do get a 5G signal, it is likely to a tower that is further away than your local one, limiting your data speed and connectivity, or it is your local one that has throttled down the speed of 5G and reduce those able to connect to it to conserve backup power. 

This is a common experience during power outages and should be expected. I would suggest switching your preferred network type to 4G LTE during outages as it tends to be more reliable during these events.

It’s also important to note that when the power goes out, cell towers go from handling a handful of data connections, to more or less everyones (since they don’t have wifi to use). The towers can only handle so much before things start to slow down. Especially in regions where there aren’t as many towers available with capacity for people’s phones to use.