I doubt wireless carriers will ever be able to seriously compete with built out fiber in the long run. Once it is there, the costs have been paid and the provider is mainly just raking in residuals while keeping the lights on.
The flip side to that is the "many rural users are at the edges of existing coverage networks".
A 4G network can reach about 10 miles (16km) - a 5G network is about 1000 feet or 0.2 miles (about 300 meters).
Unless the providers are placing these on every other power pole, most rural users aren't likely to see 5G coverage. For what it's worth, my parents' house is about 0.1 miles from the road and 0.5 miles from the next nearest neighbor.
I believe that it is unlikely that wireless 5G will get out there (they don't have 4G service either - they're in a valley and use a femtocell for home phone use).
They don't have cable or fiber either and switched from a load balanced pair of DSL lines to Starlink.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/12/10/the-definitive-guide-to-5...
> One low band (600-700MHz) tower can cover hundreds of square miles with 5G service that ranges in speed from 30 to 250 megabits per second (Mbps).
Though... I'm still going to be skeptical with the "there are still some significant areas that lack 4g coverage"
https://fcc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...
Look at the "how many areas only have one provider" or that you can see the topography and valleys in the coverage map.
but...
you will get less capacity, because at the lower frequencies there is less spectrum (it is simple arithmetic there is 1000Mhz of spectrum below 1Ghz, but there is 100Ghz of spectrum below 100Ghz (setting aside the details about how it gets allocated etc.)
The amount of capacity you can achieve is based on Shannon limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theore...
it's the classic engineering trade off, better propagation vs. more capacity.
that is why the carriers want low, medium and high band in their inventory,
low is considered < 1Ghz, medium is considered 1Ghz - 10Ghz, high is > 10Ghz, roughly speaking
Its this type of poles that I'm more interested in - https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2639251,-89.787017,3a,75y,65...
Finally got T-Mobile Home Internet (5G). Shipped the access point overnight to me. Plugged in. 600Mbps peak. Never seen a slowdown that affects my heavyweight Net use (e.g. streaming HD).