It will be a slower rollout due to the costs and infrastructure requirements, but 5g (from Verizon at least) will be faster than your home cable connection. That's a big deal.
LTE already allows 150Mbps symmetrical on an iPhone 8 (real-world speed test in London), and probably more on the newer phones.
The problem with mobile data has never been the raw speed - that is already fast enough. The problem was always how it's being sold (whether data caps, the overall - terrible - customer experience and the BS the industry is constantly pulling like AT&T sharing data for marketing purposes), and switching to a different technology won't magically change that.
From a technical perspective, it actually is a bit of a problem.
First, remember that speed is shared with everyone using the same tower (sector) as you. As data usage goes up, that will drop. In a major city where cell density is high it's less of a problem, but it's already an issue in more rural/suburban areas where cells are larger. There are plenty of places in the US that have LTE coverage, but the speed is actually pretty poor.
Second, there are some limit on the number of devices each tower can support. With embedded devices increasingly relying on cellular, we're expecting to hit those limits. So 5G allows for future system growth.
And as for data caps... more available bandwidth does help lower prices. Those prices are, at least in part, set in order to manage system load. More capacity means they can relax the pricing and/or caps.
I am aware of this, but data caps don't solve this problem either.
Data caps do nothing if everyone in a crowded area has plenty of "data" remaining and start using it all at once.
The reverse is also true, you can have towers in a low-usage area at night that are basically just burning energy, and yet if you run out of "data" you can no longer use it; so the RF airtime is essentially wasted as the only customer wishing to use it at that time & location is unable to.
Furthermore what about the "data" that somehow "expires" at the end of the month? That doesn't make sense either and proves this pricing model is just a bullshit extortion strategy and is very bad at actually addressing the problem of limited RF airtime.
The proper solution is to charge for a bandwidth, not data. The more you pay the more bandwidth you get allocated, and users can choose which plan they want based on their usage patterns.
> Data caps do nothing if everyone in a crowded area has plenty of "data" remaining and start using it all at once.
But 5G does make a difference, that's what the parent comment was trying to tell you. It allows high-density crowds to continue having high-speed access, something that is not possible today. You can barely make a phone call on NYE.
> It allows high-density crowds to continue having high-speed access
Is that an actual problem that affects many users and currently can't be resolved with LTE? I don't disagree that 5G will benefit carriers, but the hype around it being some kind of a revolution for the customer is overblown. The customer's problem is very rarely a technical shortcoming of LTE or the earlier technologies and more about how the service is sold and priced, and so far despite 5G indeed allowing much higher capacity there's no evidence that the industry as a whole is moving away from the user-hostile "data cap" model.
> You can barely make a phone call on NYE.
Isn't that a failure of the switching/call control equipment or the inter-carrier peering as opposed to tower capacity?
The key technology design dimension cell towers of almost any generation gives you is the the ability to tradeoff cell sizes and numbers of nodes with density of users. Maybe 5G gives you some incremental improvements on that, but it was always possible to put in more towers for more users.
US telecom companies in particular have always been at loath to share any cost savings with the end consumer - so I don't think consumers have any reason to be exited over marginal 5G gains on efficiency.
It's a lot easier for some mobile companies to roll out 5G than 4G too. Vodafone in the UK were still rolling with point-to-point microwave connections between masts all over the place before 4G and had to ditch that to get the bandwidth needed to support it.
Only mmWave 5G, as of now mostly used in the USA, has this problem. Sub6 5G has similar propagation to LTE. Sub6 has way less capacity than mmWave though.
I guess in the future operators will use both frequency ranges in parallel in a macro/micro cell format. If you happen to be within the range of a mmWave micro base station you will use it. If not the sub6 macro base station will make sure you remain connected with “good enough” speed.
It will be a slower rollout due to the costs and infrastructure requirements, but 5g (from Verizon at least) will be faster than your home cable connection. That's a big deal.