The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill
www.theverge.com
The flashiest use cases are still a fantasy.

The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill | Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found — and the race to deplo…::AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile’s race to deploy 5G has failed to realize its flashiest outcomes while saddling carriers with debt and removing a competitor from the market.

  • TechNerdWizard42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    176·
    1 year ago

    This is a US problem but Americans don’t travel enough to understand.

    In the US I get shitty coverage and frequent tower handoffs to lower bandwidth signals. In a downtown capital city, I generally get 30Mbps to maybe 100Mbps outside on a clear day.

    Contrast that with where I usually am, using actual good technology and true 5G, I get fibre-like pings with 1Gbps all the time, even inside buildings. If I’m outside near a tower like in the US, I get 2Gbps nearly symmetrically. Constant excellent signal, no disconnects, no dead zones.

    It’s just sad how easily the American populace is duped. Even the article mentions how there were continuous lies and the actual rollout to 5G will take many many years. The rest of the world has already done it. Heck, even Korea has announced 6G consumer installations in the next 5 years. And if you’re by the Samsung Campus with a demo tech, you can use it now!

    • jordanlund@lemmy.worldEnglish
      183·
      1 year ago

      The difference between the US and Korea is VAST though.

      Korea is just over 100,000 square kilometers, slightly bigger than Indiana, slightly smaller than Virginia.

      The US is 9.834 million square kilometers. Installing infrastructure here is an order of magnitude more difficult.

      • TechNerdWizard42@lemmy.worldEnglish
        184·
        1 year ago

        Yes that’s the talking point Americans like to use as to why their infrastructure is shit. Ok so why does it work in Europe, as a continent? Why does it work in China? Why does it work in Canada? I can be in the Arctic circle not having seen another vehicle for hours on the highway and have full reception. This is in the mountains in the Arctic in a country larger than the US in an area more remote than anywhere that exists in the US.

        The reason it doesn’t work in the US is because corporate greed and a population that is ignorant to what it should be. Where’s the outcry over the billions of dollars that the ISPs lined their pockets with for the FTTH rollout and never even remotely got close to delivering, gave up, and walked away…

    • Asafum@feddit.nlEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think it’s a lack of travel, it’s a lack of consequences and an excess of monopoly control.

      Where I live I have exactly one option, and that’s in a very populated part of NY. The companies will lie and lie and lie, bribe politicians to keep their monopoly, etc. we simply don’t have options for the most part.

      America: Land of the Fee, home of the bribe.