Hold up. There are two flavors of 5G on the market. There's standard 5G, which is an update to LTE, with similar speeds but much better performance in dense environments like stadiums, it has similar range as LTE and will be what you're on most of the time, but it's not very flashy.

Then there's 5G 'special edition', which Verizon calls 'ultra wideband', ATT calls 5G+, and TMobile calls mmWave. It runs at frequencies above 20GHz which lets it use a huge chunk of bandwidth and get nearly 1Gbps speeds, but limits the range dramatically so you only really get it in certain places.

It sounds like your friends are getting the special edition 5G and you're stuck on standard 5G. According to ATT you'll only get special edition 5G in or around love field, the att center, and the kay bailey hutchins center.