Yeah, I think this guy doesn't really get it. Basically a lot of the slashdot commenters are saying stuff like "1Gpbs is about capacity, not speed per person," and this makes sense to me. If I remember correctly, 4G can go up to something like 100Mbps. NO ONE is getting that speed, but that doesn't mean the 100Mbps figure is some sort of marketing hoax. The point is that each base station can carry up to 100Mbps total, divided up per user. Uh, yeah dude. I don't think there's much of a chance of getting any sort of signal from a base station with 150m range while you're driving, even if they were literally everywhere. Handover from one station to another isn't trivial, and you think you're going to do that every ten seconds? Come on. However if you're sharing a base station with 100 people in a train station, maybe you'll be glad to have 10Mbps to yourself instead of 1Mbps with 4G.First, it has a range, at best, of 150 meters. If you're driving, that means, until 5G base stations are everywhere, you're going to be losing your high-speed signal a lot.
If the phone companies talk about the 5g gap with china enough they hope they can get the government to further loosen the red tape on deploying 5g equipment. There have been several bills (I don't know if any of them have passed yet) that would preempt local and state governments ability to regulate how and where towers and what not get deployed. State and local government regulations span from the well informed to the wacky but one thing phone companies are sure of is that it would be easier if they could do what ever they wanted where ever they wanted. If the phone companies can whip up enough of a panic about how our knowledge economy is going to shrivel up because the China 5g gap they might even be able to wring out some sweet sweet subsidies. Have a look at who your congressman takes money from? Do you want to subsidies one of our oligarchic phone companies? Your congressmen might. We have at least one influential congressmen in our state who's lips are glued to the phone companies cock and are ready to give em what ever they ask for. 5g has some nice use cases. Stadiums, convention centers other open public spaces are going to be prime territory for it. Right now 5g sucks phone battery with a savage relentlessness that's going to make me do anything I can to avoid a 5g enabled phone for as long as I can. Hopefully 5g technology is refined and improved because right now it's mostly downside and little up. Who wants to pay $10 extra dollars a month for a poorly implemented technology with no coverage the sucks the life out of your phone? Oh shit, your right, just about everybody does because marketing... I hope they don't grift too much out of the public coffers and deliver somewhere near the $10 a month in customer benefit they are promising but I'm not counting on it.