Consensus Quietly Builds That 5G Was Overhyped, Rushed To Market

Wireless

from the ill-communication dept

Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That’s not to say that 5G won’t be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available.

If you looked past press releases you’d notice that Verizon’s early launches required the use of $200 battery add on mod because we still haven’t really figured out the battery drain issues presented by 5G’s power demands. You’d also notice the growing awareness that the long-hyped millimeter wave spectrum being used for many deployments have notable distance and line of sight issues, meaning that rural and much of suburban America will not likely see the speeds you’ll frequently see bandied about in marketing issues, and many of the same coverage gap issues you see with current-gen broadband are likely to persist.

If you looked past the headlines you’d probably noticed that even Wall Street was concerned that 5G was being over-hyped and wasn’t yet ready for prime time. Those concerns continue to be expressed largely in industry trade magazines, where you’ll often find stock jocks noting that most of the purported promises of 5G remain well over the horizon:

“What of the other fancy features of 5G, like massive IoT and ultra low latency? Specifications for those technologies are scheduled for availability in — wait for it — 2020, when the 3GPP’s Release 16 is scheduled to be finished.

“We believe the current investment opportunity associated with 5G is limited and unlikely to drive meaningful incremental upside for companies involved considering the mature state of the smartphone market,” wrote the analysts at Wall Street research firm Cowen in a recent note to investors.”

None of this is to say that these early deployments aren’t providing some very useful knowledge that will inform broader deployment. And when “real” 5G does start to slowly materialize over the next decade or so the ultra-low latency and high-speeds will ultimately help improve connectivity — provided it’s available to you. But consumer groups like the EFF continue to point out how 5G hype is obscuring our repeated failure to deploy fiber (necessary to feed cellular towers) across America despite countless billions in subsidies having been thrown at telecom giants:

“All this hype over 5G networks by these large companies has done little to answer fundamental questions in the U.S. broadband market: why are the largest ISPs not aggressively deploying fiber to the home despite its proven track record of profits and success? How is it that the United States, as the FCC has recently acknowledged, starting to slow down on fiber to the home, whereas the rest of the world moving is faster? Fiber to the home is cheap to upgrade to even higher speeds once it is laid, making it an infrastructure investment that will be good for decades to come. And its top speeds are already dwarfing even the loftiest 5G hyped assertions.”

Meanwhile, these early 5G marketing missteps are creating an aura of distrust in the minds of American consumers. Instead of being directly and clearly shown what the standard can do in the form of fully-cooked product, consumers are being taught that carriers still can’t really be trusted to accurately portray where or when the technology will be available to them. And that’s of course before you get to how much more 5G is going to cost everyone, or how many nickel-and-dime restrictions will be included in these next-generation networks in the wake of the repeal of net neutrality, hampering its full competitive potential.

Filed Under: 5g, overhype, wireless