The ‘Race to 5G’ Wound Up Being More Of A Hobbled Waddle To Nowhere

We’ve noted for years how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of a modest evolution than a revolution.

But that’s not what telecom giants like Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T promised. All three routinely promised that 5G would change the way we live and work, usher forth the smart cities of tomorrow, and even revolutionize the way we treat cancer. None of those things wound up being true.

In fact, when 5G did arrive in the U.S., speeds and performance wound up being significantly worse than in many overseas deployments. At prices far higher than in most developed countries.

As a result, many consumers wound up associating the standard not with progress, but with empty hype. And as The Verge notes in a new piece tracking 5G’s trajectory to date, investors are growing increasingly unhappy about the lack of returns on what was a major overall investment:

“And we don’t have to guess whether investors are asking questions about when they’ll see a return — they asked point blank in the company’s most recent earnings call. [Verizon] CEO Hans Vestberg fielded the question, balancing the phrases “having the right offers for our customers” and “generating the bottom line for ourselves,” while nodding to “price adjustments” that also “included new value” for customers. It was a show of verbal gymnastics that meant precisely nothing.”

There’s one area where 5G did wind up being a benefit: fixed wireless access (FWA). For folks stuck without any access, or stuck on a DSL line straight out of 2003, a home 5G FWA line is a notable improvement. It’s still not something that’s going to be as fast and reliable as fiber (or even cable), but 5G has proven to be useful when it comes to shoring up overall home broadband coverage gaps.

But unchecked and often pointless industry consolidation continues to reduce any incentive to seriously compete on price over the longer term. And as investor demand for recouped investment grows, the outcome will most assuredly be more nickel-and-diming of wireless customers. Customers on good FWA deals now will, as is wireless industry tradition, steadily see costs head skyward over time.

Meanwhile in China (the country held up as the standard we were supposedly chasing in the “race to 5G”) consumers see much, much cheaper prices for 5G connections — but also still resent being shoveled over to 5G due to the technology’s high battery drain and spotty coverage in rural markets.

All told, U.S. 5G is a far cry from the “fourth industrial revolution” telecoms and gear vendors tried desperately to present it as, and all most consumers really wanted was a reliable, more affordable connection.