What Is 5G?

pcmag.com:

After three years of promises, 2022 will be a big year for 5G.

The new mobile network tech was supposed to ignite a "fourth industrial revolution," according to Verizon—and it has not done so. The "5G" that most Americans have experienced up until now has felt just like 4G, with a new icon. This year, though, AT&T and Verizon are turning on new networks—the much talked about C-band—which along with T-Mobile's more mature mid-band network, might finally change things.

All of the hullaballoo over 5G, with no real new experiences, has led people to wonder what the big deal is. Is what we're seeing right now even 5G at all? The answer is yes—technically. It turns out that 5G technology and a "5G experience" are very different things, and right now in the US we're getting the former without the latter.

Things will start to turn, though. T-Mobile's "ultra capacity" 5G won our Fastest Mobile Networks 2021 tests by showing speeds much faster than 4G, and now that they're launching, the new C-band networks are starting to change the game for AT&T and Verizon.

5G is an investment for the next decade, and in previous mobile transitions, we've seen most of the big changes happening years after the first announcement. Take 4G, for instance. The first 4G phones in the US appeared in 2010, but the 4G applications that changed our world didn't appear until later. Snapchat came in 2012, and Uber became widespread in 2013. Video calls over LTE networks also became big in the US around 2013.

Because the 5G transition is so complicated, and because we've been having a pandemic for two years, this time the shift may take even longer. Scientists in Finland who helped developed 5G technology say that it may be 2027 before we see the robotics,