Stadiums are pretty much the only place where mmWave in phones makes sense. For the other 99.99% of usage, it's an expensive power-hungry extra radio that doesn't work. mmWave 5G is mostly a sunk cost for Verizon, and largely irrelevant to everyone else.

Stadiums, downtown areas, school sports, racetracks, etc.

Any place outside, in good weather, with high population density!

> Stadiums are pretty much the only place where mmWave in phones makes sense.

And Airports, and Parks, and Ampitheateaters, and Malls, and Theme Parks...

mmWave isn't a general solution, sure. But mmWave is great for anywhere crowded enough to benefit from a DAS setup, and there are a lot of DAS setups around.

In any case it was a much better solution than band 46 license assisted access LTE-A/NR-U which used unlicensed 5Ghz spectrum shared with wifi. If we want to talk about vaporware/abandoned stuff, this was among the most controversial and least deployed solutions to those areas before mmwave became a thing.

Agreed. Stealing public WiFi spectrum for private LTE was always a terrible idea.

>it's an expensive power-hungry extra radio that doesn't work

Yes, it requires more power.

You have to consider power and the time the radio needs to be on to accomplish the task.

If using mmWave you can transfer data at 2,000Mbps and using midband you achieve 500Mbps the baseband will be on for 4x the time with midband, and it will need to use less than 1/4th the power of mmWave to break even.

Midband does not require 1/4th the power of mmWave. Closer to 1/2th.

On 11/27/22 at 5:13pm I was in the St. Louis airport and ran a speed test on my iPhone 12 Pro Max. I was probably one of the first non-diagnostic users of their mmWave infrastructure and I must have been the only user at the time because I achieved a damn-near-practical-maximum of 3938Mbps down. The only reason I ran the speed test at all was that a notoriously sluggish web application I was using was performing spectacularly.

Since then I have been running speed tests at concerts, sporting events, traffic jams, airports, shopping centers, and the Rennaissance Faire. All locations where, prior to 5G, cellular coverage was useless.

On 10/13/24 at 1:14pm I was in a crowded terminal at Chicago O'Hare and ran a speed test on an iPhone 15 Pro Max. Connected via mmWave I achieved 1869Mbps down.

> WiMAX never really worked well at all

Neither did LTE (or VoLTE) work well at the start.

WiMAX didn't get the funding and backing primarily because it didn't integrate well with existing systems. Hilariously it fit the criteria as 4G before LTE did. I guess there was a strong vendor push to include LTE into 4G.

I had one of the few laptop models with WiMAX built-in, and I tried it several times. The only time it worked was on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, surprising me completely. But even then, the connection speed was lower than of my 3G USB modem.