The Race To 5G Is Over - Now It's Time To Pay The Bill
The Verge, Thursday, December 7,2023
Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found - and the race to deploy the tech was costly in more ways than one.
At CES in 2021, 5G was just about everywhere you looked. It was the future of mobile communications that would propel autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, and AR into reality. The low latency! The capacity! It'll change everything, we were told. Verizon and AT&T wrote massive checks for new spectrum licenses, and T-Mobile swallowed another network whole because it was very important to make the 5G future happen as quickly as possible and win the race.