I am with Tim Bray in that there is an enormous amount of woo woo spouted about 5G. Perhaps a better question to ask is what is possible now, in our current par

I am with Tim Bray in that there is an enormous amount of woo woo spouted about 5G. Perhaps a better question to ask is what is possible now, in our current paradigm, and what might be possible if there was ubiquitous high speed coverage blanketing a complete society. The first is dull, and dubious: a bit more speed. Great. The second is the province of speculation and the source of most of the nonsense. However, telcos are afraid of missing out on the value chain of 5G like they did with 4G (all that money going to apps, and not a bean to telcos). So they sunk billions into 5g spectrum believing that was the gateway, and they they need to hold on for dear life until those fancy use cases come alive. That could be 1 year from now, ten years or perhaps never. who knows? In the meantime their investors are watching closely at the only metric they have which is uptake in the consumer domain. However this is weak beer since you don't pay off $70B of spectrum costs $10 at a time (ie consumer behavior along wont bring ROI). So, pivot to businesses some of which really are groping their way to 5G. Metal buildings, outdoor coverage, military, these are real cases where existing solutions are not great. The gazillion dollar question is whether 5G from a telco is the solution. Maybe its CBRS with 5G, which cuts out the operator. Maybe its wifi 6E, which is fundamentally different from wifi 5 and has learned a lot of lessons from how cellular networks are built. imho there is real risk that 5G vs WiFi is tbe betamax/vhs or bluray/netflix battle of our time.