I barely get regular cell service in my house from my provider. There's no way I'd get a hotspot for a service that is a must have. Provider's "coverage" maps are such a joke to make them useless.
I can routinely go around most of the metro area on any given day and get hundreds of megabits of throughput back home at <10ms latency on a plan that's costing me ~$30/mo on a device that cost less than $400. I can be in a crowded sports arena and on my regular cellular internet and still manage to pull >50Mbit down despite the crowd. Several years ago, I'd be lucky to even get SMS/MMS out quickly and reliably.
to the person that is affected by it, it's not a good thing. we can argue all day about it but you're wrong to whoever you're arguing against at that point.
But other people do.
And the main resource that is limited with cell service is air time: there are only so many frequencies, and only so many people can send/receive at the same time.
So if someone wants to watch a video video, and a particular segment is (say) 100M, then if a device can do 100M/s, it will take 1s to do that operation: that's a time period when other people may not be able to do anything. But if the device can do 500M/s, then that segment can come down in 0.2s, which means there's now 0.8s worth of time for other people to do other things.
You're not going to see any difference if you're watching the video (or streaming music, or check mail), but collectively everyone can get their 'share' of the resource much more quickly.
Faster speeds allow better resource utilization because devices can get on and off the air in a shorter amount of time.
It's like I'm paying them extra for the privilege of increasing their network efficiency.
5G can also operate on additional higher frequencies than regular 4G deployments. But often a lot of 5G you see deployed are in the same 700-1900MHz-ish kind of range.
“The initial access period includes the transmission of beamformed SSBs that provide the UEs with a basic synchronization signal and demodulation reference signals. This allows for UEs to save power by going inactive and rejoining the network at a later initial access period. At the physical layer, the UE will receive the SSBs from a single antenna or using one or more spatial filters, such as a multi-panel handset used to overcome hand blockage. The UE will use the received SSB for synchronization and determining the control information. The beam reporting stage includes one or more possible SSB CSI reports which are transmitted in the random access channel. The report includes information for the strongest serving cell and may include a set of the next strongest cells within the same band to assist with load balancing. The number of reported additional cells depends on the carrier frequency, the previous state of the UE in the net- work, and the bands being monitored. In a newly-active state, the UE reports the top 6–16 additional cells across each active frequency range. This reporting helps to manage handover and mitigate cell-edge interference. In the final steps, the UE has connected to a serving cell and is ready to start receiving data. Further beam refinement and channel estimation can occur by transmitting reference signals with more precise beams. Although not specified in the standard, a typical CSI-RS would cover smaller portions of the reported SSBs’ directions or combine coherently across a multipath channel. Using more directional or precise beams can increase the SNR–thereby improving the channel estimates and beam alignment. Beam refinement can also be used to adjust the beamforming slightly to track highly mobile UEs.”
Your linked article even agrees: “Carriers can still see which cell towers your device connects to, use the strength and angle of your device’s signal to the tower, and then look up your device’s unique cellular identifier to determine your general location. Your location may never be private when you’re connected to a cellular network”
Fun fact: modern Wi-Fi standards do this too and it's possible to use the backscattered emissions to see through your walls lol https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/security/a425750...