Telecoms have the ability today to add more capacity by increasing tower density.
Everyone likes to argue that you can't have an all wireless society because there is limited bandwidth available, but as it is we are only using about 10% of the usable spectrum (from about 200MHZ to 8GHZ) for network data connectivity, and even then most of it is still privately controlled - if an area has too many AT&T subscribers and not enough Verizon customers, the Verizon spectrums go to waste while the AT&T ones are oversaturated.
There are a few things I could name off the top of my head that would overnight dramatically improve technology, but nationalizing back light for the people to use and then having this entire range opened up to generic data transfer with the same congestion rules and regulations used on currently open bandwidth rings would go a long way to improving most of our lives dramatically.
Could you name a few? This is HN after all, we like to get technical.
Consider the digital television transition - it freed up a substantial amount of spectrum for other users, but it took many years and cost billions of dollars. Broadcast TV and radio is less significant today than it was in 2009, but there are thousands of spectrum user groups who would find it difficult to switch to dynamically managed spectrum, not to mention the potential safety issues.
The RF spectrum is a busy old place. We can carve out little bits here and there, but there just aren't many useful blocks left that aren't already being used by something quite important. Most of those allocations involve co-ordination with the ITU and couldn't be significantly altered without international agreement.
https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/january_201...
Kinda like how 2.4 GHz is damn near useless for many people?
What's being said here is, "We don't foresee any problems with having our current level of capacity provisioning, and we're fine with the level of service we provide."
They will require line of site because higher frequencies can't penetrate obstacles. To get 5g speeds and capacities, you're going to need to put towers everywhere.
Smaller towers yes, but many many more of them.
The impact of land topology is seen as so important that the UK Ordnance Survey have got involved with simulating 5G coverage:
But the fault doesn't completely lie with the telcos. Getting permission to build a tower can take years.
For more dynamic situations (think Glastonbury music festival) the telcos have been deploying mobile cell towers from the back of trucks:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_cell_sites
These don't just get used for pop concerts in stadiums but also for disaster response:
http://about.att.com/inside_connections_blog/hurricane_maria
Except they're more interested in pitching their bullshit iBeacon-based "SmartGuide" tracking technology or light show than network access. This is one of the major problems I see with mobile telcos; they seem to get sidetracked on everything but the mobile network which should be their top priority.
No, I don't give a shit about kids programming the light shows or iBeacons, I need fast, rock-solid network access; leave the rest to other companies that have the resources and focus do it better.