[vel0city]

At the basic level these two things are pretty similar. Its the same concept, just a difference in scale. The tower can only slice time so much before clients have to wait longer and longer to transmit. The faster a client can send its burst of data and get off the air, the more clients you can have connected per tower. I've personally experienced plenty of circumstances where even though signal strength is fine, there just isn't enough bandwidth for reliable cellular service.

[Johnny555]

I understand that if a single cell tower is overloaded, then its clients will have issues talking to that single cell tower.

My point is that a city with a thousand traffic lights will be covered by hundreds if not thousands of cells, so the issue of traffic lights competing for bandwidth for a single source is non existent.

And this problem doesn't change for 2G, 3G, 4G, or even 5G. Perhaps 5G can scale better but if you had a single 5G tower covering an entire city, it too would run out of capacity.