There's a new "G" every ten-ish years. Usually there is a lot of hype in the 2 to 3 years before the next G launches, at which point the early release standards

There's a new "G" every ten-ish years. Usually there is a lot of hype in the 2 to 3 years before the next G launches, at which point the early release standards are frozen. If equipment has a nominal 5 year replacement span, you deploy early release equipment, then at the half-way point, replace it with newer eqiupment, while looking for the next "G". The "G"s are driven by marketing and hype - "5G" is better than "4G" and promises a pile of use-cases that haven't materialised. It's pointless even trying to dispel the hype. 1ms latency was heralded, 10 Gbit throughput, etc etc. You can't really do a round-trip measured to the radio (across just the air interface) yet with 1ms latency, let alone 1ms to anywhere meaningful. I'm reminded of Carmack's famous statement [0] about latency. ARPU (average revenue per user) is not going up, at least in the European markets I'm aware of. Customers were not willing to pay more for 4G or 5G. In fact, I think many are ending up paying less - I negotiated a better deal this time around than last time around (anecdote, n=1, but far from alone) - competition is tight in a 4-operator market. I don't think patents are necessarily driving the push - the push comes from operators competing to win churn from rivals. This comes from a race to the bottom on price. As soon as someone has "5G", everyone needs it, whether it's really 5G, or just 4G with the string changed on the screen [1]. "Another G" helps drive sales, and coverage helps drive sales. The operators drive the market, as they own the relationship with the customer. Vendors sell whatever operators want, and try to help them make a more compelling differentiated product (which is a dumb pipe now...) - they have fought over "fastest" and "coverage", now they are fighting over "lowest latency" and "best experience" and "most reliable"... Ultimately, LTE is going nowhere fast, in my view. It varies by market, but will still be the underlying dominant tech for a few more years - unless you are on T Mobile USA or one of a few other carriers, your 5G is "non-standalone" and fully reliant on the 4G network and radios - the 5G cell is carrier-aggregated in as extra capacity. In early systems, uplink was only over 4G, so the only place the 5G radio was used for was downlink. Therefore I'm not convinced it's really patents that drive this, rather marketing and attempts to differentiate and sell to win over others' churn in a reasonably competitive marketplace with limited barriers to switching, and huge cross/up-sell opportunity when you do win a customer. [0] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/193480622533120001 https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/193480622533120001 [1] https://www.xda-developers.com/att-fake-5ge-icon-added-aosp/ https://www.xda-developers.com/att-fake-5ge-icon-added-aosp/