we don't need 5G nationwide. You (or someone copying and pasting you) have said this two or three times in this thread, and i am not sure why we need to be educated that there's "huge capital expenses" for building out a network that requires orders of magnitude more points of presence than the LTE networks. None of the three actually have unlimited service (at least on post-paid) as an option, so giving us "gigabit cellular" at a huge capital expense doesn't make sense to us, as consumers.

The only way it makes sense is if the wireless companies have other customers that are served by having orders of magnitude additional antennas everywhere.

And regardless of the arguments against the above, the cellular carriers were given billions and billions of taxpayer money, and tax breaks, and all manner of kid-glove court and legislative decisions in the past 30 years. Consumers are getting screwed from every side possible, more taxes, more fees, and more monthly service charges.

but at least the ads load blazing fast while i'm on the train, i guess.

You seem to be making things up or are just ignorant of the market dynamics. Regardless of your personal limited needs, there is actually huge demand for fast, reliable 5G service nationwide. Customers have voted with their wallets.

Moving to 5G with more antennas also allows for more efficient spectrum use in most cases. Spectrum is extremely expensive, and a limiting factor in some areas.

How have customers “voted with their wallets” when all of the major players released 5G to all their customers? It’s not like any actual choice was made by the customer.

> we don't need 5G nationwide.

I mean, I want 5G when I go travel without needing to pay extra, and that happens right now. I don't want to pay roaming charges just because I fly to Detroit or a small town in Missouri.

And history has shown that smaller carriers aren't going to provide that kind of service.

Roaming charges have nothing inherent to do with the presence or absence of 5G. You can have multiple networks with their own 5G hardware that charge roaming fees, and you can have a mixture of 4G and 5G but agreements that no roaming will be charged.

If you've got a plan that specifically limits you to 5G if you want to avoid roaming charges, then that's between you and your (likely oligopolistic) carrier.

> The only way it makes sense is if the wireless companies have other customers that are served by having orders of magnitude additional antennas everywhere.

The big reason to push 5G is surveillance. You could always be tracked to within half a mile or so with cell phone towers, but with 5G the cell towers alone can track you within a specific building. mmWave 5G provides location information with sub-meter precision. Telecom companies sell our location data, and with 5G that location data becomes much much more valuable.

5G does not require more points of presence than LTE. They can run on the same frequencies, which is where properties of range and penetration come from. 5G has additional higher frequencies with those issues yes, but they're not the only form of 5G.

It's like the difference between 2.4Ghz wifi, and 5/6 Ghz wifi. Wifi 6 adds 6 Ghz which has decreased ranged, but that doesn't stop you from running Wifi 6 on 2.4Ghz, which still comes with improvements. If you're making a new deployment it's not going to be Wifi 5 on 2.4Ghz.

In that same way, new towers are going to be 5G. The only drawback of running 5G instead of 4G on the same frequency is device compatibility.

AT&T runs 4G and 5G on bands 2. And are shutting down 4G on band 5 to migrate to 5G: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T_Mobility#Radio_frequenc...