World's first liquid cooled 5G base station deployed in Finland

If you’re worried about energy inefficiency, the best things to focus on are probably domestic insulation and reducing car usage. People tend to get hung up on the small stuff.

It’s really bizarre to me that THIS is the aspect of consumerism that people go after for energy use. Improved access to the internet has substantial benefits to society; a little energy use is acceptable. SUVs and 5000sqft houses have no obvious benefit to society at all, and use vastly more energy than the telecoms industry could dream of using.

Getting less popular now that tankless gas and electric heating is a thing, but they're historically pretty common in some countries. They're more efficient than electric tank water heating approaches, and arguably more efficient than gas tanked systems, sometimes (usual caveats for comparing gas and electric heating apply).

A major downside is that you typically can't have more than one, or at _most_ two, in one home. Some installations have a scary setup where there are two or more of them, but only one will operate at a time.

Major improvement is latency, which not only enhances existing application experience significantly, makes development easier by removing lots of concern, but it also enables completely new tech that has been stopped because of the latency profile of earlier tech.

What you're propably thinking of is the smallest use case like a webpage (which can still significantly be sped up) or a video. But have you though about loading several GiB sized app for just product demonstration purposes on the fly? The things fast connections enable can be hard to even imagine. You could have an entire VR/AR experience where-ever you are

It's impossible to see all the future exploits the new technology allows. All the things we do are built upon other existing ideas, moving to higher speed, lower latency connection is another step in progress.

Think about being able to download several GiB application on the fly just to view a demo for a house, or get the schematics for what you're viewing in realtime with AR

I would bet that 5G has cut down base stations which operate similarly to 4G, but the option to not use a new generation only works for maybe 1 generation before it gets too far behind. Data consumption is still going up after all, and some countries (such as Australia) have already mandated the shutdown of older generations, with 2G switched off to refarm spectrum, and 3G scheduled for switch off.

We should focus on how not to get into this paradox.