No, if anything it will be harder to connect rural areas with 5G. 4G’s coverage is measured in miles. 5G’s coverage is measured in feet.

https://www.verizon.com/about/news/how-far-does-5g-reach

> 5G Ultra Wideband network’s signal can reach up to 1,500 feet without obstructions

You're quoting something about “5G Ultra Wideband”, which seems to be a brand name for mmWave. Yes, mmWave has very short range. But 5G isn't just mmWave. It's in many ways an evolution of LTE/4G, supporting the same frequencies and offering the same range, i.e. multiple km/miles. But it's up to carriers how they allocate their frequencies. To quote Wikipedia:

> 5G can be implemented in low-band, mid-band or high-band millimeter-wave 24 GHz up to 54 GHz. Low-band 5G uses a similar frequency range to 4G cellphones, 600–900 MHz, giving download speeds a little higher than 4G: 30–250 megabits per second (Mbit/s). Low-band cell towers have a range and coverage area similar to 4G towers.

— https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Overview

5G is _perfect_ for providing coverage in rural areas, except for the problem that 4G devices are incompatible with 5G networks. Starting 5G rollout in urban areas makes more sense because (a) 5G provides most benefit when clients are close together, and (b) because denser cells make it reasonably economical to maintain 4G coverage in parallel to 5G coverage.

That's a fair point -- that the tech is capable of supporting it. I could be wrong, but in the near term I don't recall any US carriers proposing to allocate any low-band spectrum that way.

Either way, if we're talking about "coverage" for low-bandwidth stuff like fitness trackers, it's the spectrum that matters more than anything. We can communicate thousands of miles on 1 or 2 watts of LF spectrum using technology that is nearly a century old. Don't need 5G for that, just need to use the right spectrum.

I'm very excited to heqr the plan for locating 5G towers in the ocean, in remote wilderness sites, in underground facilities, the Antarctic, etc. People visit these sites and expect their tech to work fine as long as it doesnt obviously require a network connection. Of course I can't browse HN from those places, but my otherwise self contained apps should continue to run predictably.

The higher frequencies of 5G are even more easily blocked by outdoorsy things like trees and rain.

How so? I thought 5G is mostly coming to densely populated areas, that is, areas that already have decent connectivity. Also, at least currently, I thought 5G is a developed country thing. Lots of folks are still running off 3G.

Huh, almost seems like 5G is marketing bullshit? The primary goal of 5G being to goad and shame consumers into upgrading a perfectly capable older phone to a new phone that is “5G ready”

I'm very excited to have gigabit download speeds so I can hit my hidden "unlimited" undescribed quota within a minute while also permanently having hotspot throttled to 128kbps.

There still likely won't be towers in the mountains or backcountry.