5G in a lot of ways is a Solution in Search of a Problem. I think that's certainly the case for consumer cellular. In my mind, we already had enough bandwidth f

5G in a lot of ways is a Solution in Search of a Problem. I think that's certainly the case for consumer cellular. In my mind, we already had enough bandwidth for almost everything that people do on their mobile devices, including streaming video. There are certainly advantages to some of the new spectrum (penetration of 600Mhz, for example), but that could've just as easily been rolled out as part of the existing generation. There were supposed to be improvements that would help carriers with network congestion, by allocating large chunks of bandwidths to clients with the highest SNR to get them off the network faster, but anecdotally I haven't noticed anything significant. There are some super cool high performance applications, though: fixed-point and point-to-point wireless can be vastly improved with the new spectrum and higher efficiency modular ion techniques. But of course that often gets abused by carriers and deployed in unsuitable environments (I'm looking at you T-Mobile Internet) causing poor experiences for customers. There should also be some cool applications in automotive eventually (C-V2X: cellular-vehicle to everything), especially for self driving, but things seem to be moving especially slow on that front. I do have to say, though, that working on some 5G projects has been incredibly challenging and very rewarding. There have been really cool innovations in circuit design to make things work at these (theoretically) high bandwidths. Disclaimer: Qualcomm employee but opinions are my own