> In the middle of Seattle there are still holes in coverage where I data speeds slow to a complete crawl.
Ironically, this is the one situation where 5G is actually useful. The unambiguous benefit to 5G is that it increases the total load capacity of the cell network. People who live in areas where the network operates at capacity large amounts of the time (such as Seattle) will see an increase in reliability even if they don't see an increase in speed.
Coverage holes are the real problem in American wireless.
It's awful in rural areas, and often still pretty bad around big cities.
When carriers claim they have coverage of 300 M pops, I wonder if it is more like 220 M pops. All the time I go to places that the carrier maps say have coverage and there is no signal.
Efforts to parcel out money to improve rural cell service fell through because there are no useful coverage maps.
I spent last weekend in a town with no cell service.
Amazingly, every person there didn't suddenly die. There weren't pedophiles crawling all over the place looking for children to snatch. The town didn't burn down. None of the fears that cell companies have put into us came to pass. People simply didn't have a phone stuck in their pockets everywhere they went.
When people wanted to communicate, they went to the little bar/restaurant next to the sheriff's office. Lots of people talking. Trading jokes. Watching sports on satellite TV. Kids outside playing whatever shouty games kids play.
Not one cell phone. And somehow the world didn't end.
I think it is just a factor that limits the business.
I don't own a smartphone or even a dumbphone. At times I had two prepaid phones, one on the Verizon network, one on the AT&T network. Neither one worked at my house. Between the two prepaid phones I could sometimes talk on the phone while traveling, whether that means driving around Upstate NY or visiting big cities.
At one point I was about to put another $100 on my Tracfone for a year's service and realized I'd accumulated 4500 minutes.
Given that I don't talk on the phone much and that the coverage is poor in places where I go, I don't even have a cheap phone plan, never mind an expensive phone plan.
So in my case, U.S. carriers could increase their revenue if they improved their coverage.
Exactly. And of course the situation is much worse anywhere outside of a major city. Pushing a newer, faster, shorter-range technology is the opposite of what needs to be worked on.
Isn't this exactly what 5G offers? The mmWave stuff is largely a sideshow, but the big win was supposed to be allowing more people to share LTE frequencies without interfering with each other as much I thought?
Ironically, this is the one situation where 5G is actually useful. The unambiguous benefit to 5G is that it increases the total load capacity of the cell network. People who live in areas where the network operates at capacity large amounts of the time (such as Seattle) will see an increase in reliability even if they don't see an increase in speed.