So far, 5G haven’t lived up to the hype. The industry have already said that it won’t be practical to deploy 5G MM-wave nationwide due to cost. It’ll only be used in highly urbanized and densely populated parts of the country. Since cost is always going to be an issue, the government will have to act.

T-Mobile at least has enough sub-6GHz spectrum now (thanks to Sprint) that they might be able to have some success with 5G. We'll see.

The lower frequencies that you mentioned will not deliver fiber-like speeds. It will help with coverage, but won't ever match up the 5G hype that's been made.

It doesn't need to be gigabit speeds to make a difference, though initial speed tests on T-Mobile do show peaks getting close. The bigger advantage, IMO, is providing additional options that can reasonably compete with what most people get on the cable side (and thus hopefully allowing enough competition to get our pricing closer to what other developed countries see).

What about bandwidth? There's only so much to go around to ensure that everyone gets decent performance.

If you take a look at the link, they're using 40MHz of bandwidth (about ~1/3 of what they own depending on the area of the country). Spinning up another 80MHz should help, at least for a time. Not to mention that it's possible to use unlicensed spectrum for 5G as well.

In any case, we'll see whether people are ultimately satisfied with their service.

Wireless will still not have as much capacity as a wired network. Will there be data caps? Ultimately, I remain unconvinced that 5G will be the answer. Maybe SpaceX will help. I still think the government will need to subsidize in order to narrow the digital divide.

Remember that data caps exist even on wired networks, though at least in those cases, it's a money grab (at least IMO). Also, T-Mobile's Home Internet service supposedly has no caps even though it only uses LTE.

Subsidize what, exactly? Broadband in general? We (through tax dollars) have subsidized it, to the tune of BILLIONS of dollars a year since the Clinton era. The Telcos (Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, et al) have been sucking up all that money intended to subsidize improving and expanding broadband in the US into rural areas and producing nothing in return. Broadband in rural areas is only marginally available today compared to where it was in the '90s and early 2000's. And I'm not talking about rural in the sense of some middle of nowhere town in rural Texas, or somewhere in Wyoming... I'm taking about even where I live, nestled right next to Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh, NC (The Research Triangle area). My county, literally next door to one of the east coast's major technology hubs, STILL has areas that are only served by dial-up, or at best 25Mb/s DSL. No cable, no faster DSL. The only options for many in my county are Century Link's embarrassingly slow DSL, or satellite with the exorbitant costs, data caps, and other issues unique to satellite internet. Even a 4G hot spot is not an option for many, because Verizon service is fairly dodgy, due to lack of towers to provide blanket coverage, and towers that don't always work and take weeks to months to get fixed. 5G is still a decade off here, because they'd HAVE to increase the tower count in order to provide even basic 5G coverage, and they can't even get enough towers up for 4G/LTE today.

Point is, there ARE subsidies, and that money is not being used to upgrade our national infrastructure. It's an embarrassment of the highest order to think that the country that literally invented the internet, cannot provide the internet to it's citizens despite billions and billions of dollars spent to subsidize that internet.

MM wave is a joke. Your hand effectively blocks it. The walls and windows of your home block it. The windows of my car block it. Tree leaves block it. Unless you're in an area where people are on-foot, outdoors, in clear air, it doesn't make sense. Verizon's tried lighting up a few NFL stadiums with it and still can't cover an entire stadium with it.

Besides the obvious (more, smaller towers) I think the future lies in the past -- data compression. It's how we got more speed out of dial-up modems and with today's processors and algorithms we should be able to do it again.

Home internet would also make using fixed exterior antennas viable, so signal strength might not be as big of an issue with mmWave as it is when trying to use it on a phone. Of course, that would probably preclude self-installation by the end user.

Also, streaming video is already pretty heavily compressed. I'm not sure we can get much more out of that approach without significant degradation in quality.

I meant to say the continued subsidization to expand internet access. If you had my posts in the past, you would know that I’m on the same page as you. It’s embarrassing that the US can’t provide every one of its own citizens with decent internet infrastructure. It’s ridiculous that Asia have better internet infrastructure. I know cost is often cited an example. However, it’s not like the US is a poor country. It has put men on the moon. It has built the world’s most formidable military.

They’re always coming out with better encoders. Just yesterday, the industry announced the latest encoder for 4K/8K content of the future. As computing power continue to increase, I expect better encoders and algorithms to be developed.

Indeed, the current implementation is a joke given the issue of coverage, but I believe that is the only way to deliver the kind of speed that we were promised with 5G.

I'm not sure what we need more speed at this point. I've gotten as high as 216Mbps with T-Mobile using an unlocked (non-TMO), ratty S7 phone. Typical for me is ~35Mbps, which is more than sufficient for anything I've ever needed it for. For that matter, I only have 10Mbps connections at my homes and it's more than enough to do 4K.

I've been involved with Wireless ISPs for the past 15+ years... We do use high Ghz antennas/radios...BUT... it's not reliable over long distances. For my office connection, there is a ~60GHz link, but we're only 0.2 miles away, direct line-of-sight, and there are 24GHz and 5GHz backup radios which we fall back on when there's fog/rain in the area.

It's been ~25 or so years since I played with media compression...but it was thought that MP3 was the best audio compression we could do. I came up with a modified form of it which gave an additional 60-70% reduction over MP3. Your mobile phone has this codec today. Unfortunately, I didn't patent it at the time. ::facepalm:: I have no doubt that we're far from done with data compression algorithms.

...and having spent quite a bit of time in Alaska, physics and logistics are a formidable problem. In an ideal world, we'd all like to pay $20/mo for gigabit fiber with no limits. Even if the telcos weren't squandering and profiteering, this still wouldn't be a reality. Infrastructure isn't sexy. Infrastructure won't win votes. Infrastructure is expensive. In this area there are still a ton of people on wells and septic systems, despite being in the middle of the city, surrounded by retail, restaurants, businesses, etc. One city near here has been forcing people off wells & septic systems and onto city water/sewers, charging them $20k for the "privilege". You can get a fiber strung anywhere in this country...but being able to afford it is a completely different story.