The jury is still out about real world mm-wave 5g becoming widespread any time soon outside few exceptionally crowded public places. Besides network support, a lot of phones don't support it either.
To me the whole angle of this seems wrong. Who out there has a solid LTE signal and is going “oh if only this were faster”.
On the other hand when I have 1 bar I might has well have nothing at all. Shortening the range of the base stations doesn’t seem like it would help this.
In the US I went from unlimited data 3G to 10gb during the 4G LTE days, down to eventually 5gb (Verizon).
There are many I know with the same personal experience.
I have no doubt that big data plans will one day be ubiquitous -- but I have much more doubt that mobile providers are actually trying to provide me with a better experience and more freedom to do what I want.
They care about profit, and that's about it.
They gave away big data plans when few people cared about actually using them, and now that the phones and the userbase has caught up to those numbers the providers pull the rug from under them in order to secure further profits -- god forbid the user demand forces upgrades, that'd ruin the profits even further.
10Gbps would, of course, be even better, at home and mobile.
20-40 Mbps is more than enough for streaming. So I suppose you’re regularly downloading very large files or something?
Genuinely curious what use cases you notice a difference.
Or maybe it’s the better latency of your gigabit that you notice more so than the throughput?
I was referring to a laptop in my original statement. I usually plug it into the LTE router directly with a gigabit cable, or use Wi-Fi which generally exceeds the uplink capacity. 5G fixes that, for a wireless LAN.
As for why you'd need higher bandwidth on a mobile device, it is simple: to live-stream the 2160p@60fps captured from the device's sensors. Another good reason is app updates: doing app updates on a mobile device frequently includes a few gigabytes of downloads. Same with laptops, of course, which are increasingly connected via mobile data. Many AAA games have updates in the 20-200GB range.
A lot of this kind of stuff assumes that someone is on mobile temporarily until they get back to a "real" wifi connection (iOS didn't let you download any apps over 2GB on mobile data for a long while). For some of us, or all of us at some times, there isn't a "real" connection to go back to.
I suspect it's a small enough minority nobody is too worried about it from a policy point of view.
I'm sure that number pales in comparison to the number of truckers, oil workers, and construction types globally that spend weeks or months on the road at a time. It's probably easily 100 million people that will immediately directly benefit from increased mobile bandwidth.
That's not even counting the dozens of developing countries where they just skipped cabling altogether and mobile data is the only internet access available. That probably boops the figure up to a billion or more.
However, huge chunk of those people you mention are nothing like mobile only, and for many the model of heavier downloads on wifi works just fine.
My point was particularly about catering to the mobile only crowd, which is pretty small (US/ EU etc., anyway).
The use of a different radio band, therefore less contention in the existing mobile bands - less congestion results in better speeds overall.
Reducing the range of base stations. shorter range means less clients, less congestion and therefore better speeds, whilst also deploying them more densely to cope with wider areas and higher bandwidth densities. Also, shorter range reduces the power requirements, meaning mobile devices will have longer battery life (nothing magical, probably not even noticeable to the average user), or it can be built into smaller/low power devices such as IoT.
Utimately, 5G is irrelevant to end users until it's actually deployed widely. Just like 3G and 4G, the end user has no impact on the deployment of the network other than the demand for it. So, all the hype around 5G is almost entirely marketing, politics etc. It only really matters once 5G is deployed across the areas you visit daily, and until then the previous generations of mobile connectivity will continue to serve just fine.
Your suggestion about a football stadium is an interesting test case. Ideally, an area that size would be served by up to a dozen base stations, spread throughout the stadium. Compare this with a single 3G base station that would cover the stadium, plus a large portion of the local area, and you can see the pros/cons fairly easily. But how many people are surfing the web whilst watching a game? or taking calls, answering texts etc. Very few during active play time, but there'll be large bursts of traffic in any breaks in play which will stress the older mobile generations to breaking point whereas 5G is designed to deal with that scenario fairly well.