Also, a lot of telecoms are kind of ignoring 4g/lte deadspots in favor of just putting new NSA 5G cells it seems. I’m excited, but I’m also biased because I work in the industry.
That just emphasizes what marketing bullshit 5G is. Telecoms won't properly build out infrastructure to avoid LTE deadspots, and yet are pushing 5G. But ... people say that proper 5G needs many many more cells than LTE!
Its not entirely irrational - if your customers spend 99% of their time in some given area, it could make sense to improve capacity in those areas instead of chasing that last 1% of coverage.
T-Mobile has actively reduced coverage these last few years where I live. Went from having almost full bars to almost nothing and calls never being put through and dropping. Just a mile or two from at least three different towers. Even with their lte hotspot placed inside my house, their network doesn't work well. I see commercials about 5g and I think, how about implementing 1g first and getting basic phone service before pretending to deploy some bullshit 5g that likely won't be around for years and no one gives a fuck about? Anyway, I have no delusions about fixing this. Unfortunately Verizon is cdma so the only real competitor is att. Tried Google fi but it wasn't great and Comcast can go fuck themselves. So either I switch to a carrier that is more expensive and likely just as bad or I stay with the shit service because the telecom idiots decided to downgrade their network ten miles outside one of the biggest cities on the west coast.
You'll have to excuse me for being skeptical about a technology pushed by telcos that in 2020 still can't get a basic cellphone voice call to connect or text messages to send reliably even with an lte hotspot literally inches away from a phone they claim 100% support for.
Travelling around Korea and back home I noticed the distinct difference in consumption habbits.
Korea data isn't capped, so everyone streams news/twitch/YouTube while on there commute.
Back home, everyone reads articles and spam scrolls static images on instagram.
So "do people need bandwidth" no. Will they use it if they have it? Absolutely.
Expanding our capabilities always has unknown unknown benefits just around the corner.
And the supposed ubiquity argument for more network bandwidth is stale. People have been making this argument for decades at this point, it's roughly the same age as "When everybody with a mobile phone gets cancer you'll see" arguments.
Any time you think you see an exponential curve stretch off to infinity it just means you zoomed in too far. 16kbps was much too slow, and 16Mbps still feels a little cramped although everything works, but it turns out you have no real use for 16Gbps, even if most people you know have it too.
I believe a lot of people got the wrong idea because for them two things came along together - they got more bandwidth and Always On access together, typically as DSL or a Cable Modem. I happen to have received them separately over time, partly a quirk of fate and partly because it had been very important to me to get access to the network long before most people knew it existed.
Always On makes a huge qualitative difference. Broadband not so much. A household with Always On at 56kbps is very different from a traditional "dial-up" at 56kbps, in a way that one with 100Mbps vDSL isn't so different from one with 1Mbps ADSL or 1Gbps fibre-to-the-home. It changes how you think about using the Network, because it's always there.
I agree. My steps were dialup ISDN 64kbps -> always-on DSL 256kbps -> campus 100Mbps.
Dialup to always-on was much, much bigger change than slow DSL to blazing fast campus speeds.
Another use case is streaming + AR, I can see that becoming crazy bandwidth intensive. I think there can be some cool games if we can get high mobile bandwidth and a cleaner AR (ie. Apple glasses) experience medium.
I also think if you're asking from the perspective of why would the 4a but $350 but 4a-5g be $500, then I'd guess that the 4a-5g is going to come with more than just 5g capabilities.
More "G's" have to be better. so 5 "G's" are clearly better than 4. It's kinda like that great scene in the movie This is Spinal Tap. The amp "numbers all go to eleven". When pressed, the obvious advantage is "These go to eleven".
The average person couldn't explain what either LTE or 5G are.
I just ran a Speedtest on my phone and with a relatively weak signal I'm getting 10 Mbps download via LTE. Isn't that good enough for the latest cat GIF?
I think the industry wants 5G to deal with improved cell service in densely occupied places such as football stadiums. Well, that obviously won't be a priority for the next few years!