Yes, there's hype and confusion around latency and 5G. Already with LTE most of the latency you're seeing comes from the network side, not from the radio link i

Yes, there's hype and confusion around latency and 5G. Already with LTE most of the latency you're seeing comes from the network side, not from the radio link itself. And LTE latency can be low enough for customer application as you're experiencing. "low latency" for 5G is related to a variant called URLLC, for Ultra-reliable and low-latency. 5G is an umbrella for 3 different variants: 1) eMBB: the massive broadband with higher speed, mostly with mmWave. This is associated with the 3GPP "NR" (New Radio) cellular standard; 2) massive IoT: this will actually be done based on LTE CatM and NB-IoT for a long while, with small improvements in release 15. It can be confusing, but the "Gs" are performance requirements defined by the ITU-T, and not a specific technology. Then a tech that meets the 5G requirements can claim (honestly, without marketing hype) to be 5G. It turns out that for massive IoT LTE meets the 5G ITU-T specs. Later on there will be a new tech based on NR, but nobody is in a hurry there, as LTE IoT is ok; 3) URLLC, the optimized for low-latency variant based on NR. URLLC is the less clear of the 3 really. The vision is to use NR for industrial control applications, and maybe VR/AR for consumer too. There are low-level optimizations down to the radio framing layer to reduce latency. Lots of fuzzy visions, but I'm not sure anyone has a clear business case. The work on this at 3GPP (the organization defining the LTE and NR specs) is progressing slowly. In particular there's always a cost to reduced latency, so it won't be for free. Private usage for factory could make sense, but consumer use is less clear. There's a tendency to confuse the "regular 4G/5G" with URLLC, but the later is a different beast and not solid yet.