It is kind of sad to see. The carriers saw "hey all these people are giving away WiFi for free and not giving us money", so they fixed the glitch and just made their own version of WiFi that they get money for when you use. Imagine a world where the WiFi alliance said "fuck it, 802.11 is dead, we're going to use modern technology" and just developed 5G technology but in an open way that anyone could use? Things would be a lot better. But here we are, with backwards compatibility for 802.11b that eliminates any chance of ever getting good performance (except in an RF test chamber), and so companies are just routing around the damage and turning WiFi-alike into a profit center.

At one point the mobile carriers were just planning to just flat-out steal the unlicensed band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_in_unlicensed_spectrum

I haven't heard any arguments about how 5G is going to come to rural areas, however. I think the backhaul requirements are pretty heavy. So in Manhattan, probably going to work out quite well. In the middle of nowhere? We'll see about that.