5G's very high bandwidth and other features help to solve the following issue: when you get a huge population close together all communicating, (as in stadiums, conventions or during emergencies in very dense population centers) the airwaves become too congested to get more than a few KB/s with older tech.

Or even just in dense cities. I see 4G speeds as high as 90 Mbps at (eg) 6AM, but at 9PM on a weeknight it can slow to 2 Mbps or less due to congestion. Too slow to stream video with decent quality or to download anything, and it’s very frustrating!

I can stream Netflix on my 25mbit/s. For personal use I absolutely don't care about 5G. For professional use it might give me better picture quality when I remote into work, but I think my work's VPN server is more of a bottleneck currently.

> ”I can stream Netflix on my 25mbit/s. For personal use I absolutely don't care about 5G.”

I can stream at 25 Mbps just fine on 4G+/LTE too. At off-peak times. I’ve even seen it hit 70, 80, 90 Mbps occasionally.

The problem happens at peak times, usually starting around 6pm, when the network slows to a crawl and I can’t stream things reliably despite having 5/5 signal strength, because my carrier (Three UK) has sold too many cheap unlimited data plans and their 4G network is highly congested.

5G is needed because it greatly improves the data carrying capacity of given blocks of spectrum, meaning more users and higher speeds in areas that currently suffer capacity constraints.

And honestly, 5G’s 200 Mbit+ speeds would just be nice to have to speed up things like downloading multi-GB OS updates and the like.

That might be less to do with your carrier's cellular edge capacity (are you in a densely populated area with lots of people on the same cell station as you?) and more to do with your carrier's intenet edge capacity (3 has lots of customers using a lot of internet)

If it's the former, 5G helps you. If it's the latter, 5G makes zero difference to you.

Yes, I can’t say for sure but I assume it’s the former. It’s certainly a dense area (Central London) and there are certainly many people around here with 3 unlimited data plans.

If I monitor my router’s status page I can see it start to bounce between several different Cell IDs when the congestion hits, and the SINR drops to low single digits (from 16-20dB when it’s fastest).

In any case, as I understand it, backhaul upgrades will be a part of 3’s 5G rollout anyway.

I tried 5G in Shenzhen on a demo phone, still only 10 mb/s to Hongkong, but you can have 300mb/s to the nearest NX.

Unless your server sits right beside the cell tower, you will never see that promised 1gb/s

Is that much of an improvement on 4G? I often see 250 mbps on LTE during off-peak hours

Your internet speed and latency may be fast enough for the current media/mediums on the internet, but I think it would be naive to assume (without strong evidence/reasoning) that "there's nothing left to be invented" which might consume more bandwidth, or require lower latencies in the near future.

Reading some of the comments I see that I don't have the same use case (data cap, so never streaming video ; and rarely need to vpn or do remote work with only a mobile connection available).

I am excluding future usage though (biggest I could see is "That smartphone is your only mean of connection to the net, either via the device or when acting as a modem.").

This. Especially because 4G is far, from being deployed everywhere.

Well if it made VOIP a great experience instead of an so-patchy-you-have-to-survey-users-after-every-call experience then it might be a big deal.