Talking to myself
  Crying out loud
  Only I can hear me, I'm
  Stuck inside a cloud

Last thing I need is a data connection so fast it can burn through my data cap in 5 seconds.

You're doing that thing where people say it isn't something only to reveal in a few extra sentences that you mean the opposite. "It's not imperative but its going to certainly happen."

Just the facts Jack :)

pretendscholar is asserting that because it will happen, it must happen. You're arguing that it need not despite the fact that it will.

So the quoted comment to me says "it doesn't need to happen (not imperative) but it's what likely will happen (where it's going)". No internal inconsistency.

We need 5G for self driving cars

We need 5G for industry automation

We need 5G for IoT (because that makes so much sense, lol)

We need 5G for ...

Or, you know, it's not like traffic signals move around on their own, so they could just be hardwired.

So 5G is not needed for that purpose at all.

The sub-GHz 802.11 seems to be uniquely american thing. And maybe just pushing anything over RF is somewhat uniquely Czech thing (caused by the fact, that Czech spectrum allocation has somewhat unique additional 10GHz ISM band), but in Prague there is an giant nest of smallish microwave antennas on every tenth street light pole (the extreme is probably Malostranske namesti, where there is 10GHz link between two traffic signals that spans about 70m).

Also, while its true one could just wire up all of these fixed devices, these wiring costs would massively drive up the cost of implementation. Trenching city streets to lay new cables costs a lot of money, just ask Google.

A cell tower has more than a single channel and a city with a thousand traffic lights is going to have many cells, so using existing cellular generations is not going to run into problems with collisions from 1000 traffic signals trying to send data at once.

My point is that a city with a thousand traffic lights will be covered by hundreds if not thousands of cells, so the issue of traffic lights competing for bandwidth for a single source is non existent.

And this problem doesn't change for 2G, 3G, 4G, or even 5G. Perhaps 5G can scale better but if you had a single 5G tower covering an entire city, it too would run out of capacity.

So the shorter distance the 5g signals go also mean more towers with more connections. My point is, don’t focus on the speed as being the huge innovation, it’s the number of devices possible. Although once it’s available, you will see apps come out that you may not have expected that take advantage of the higher speeds to do cool things.

But yes, we need to move in the direction of 5g or something similar to allow the tech you listed to take off.