[grahamburger]

The real motivation here is that mobile carriers want to take market share from cable companies. Mobile carriers want to be able to provide wireless to your phone that is good enough that you will pay more for an unlimited plan and cancel your cable subscription. 5G doesn't really do that much for garbage cans, they could already have 4G or wifi chips in them if anyone wanted that.

[manuelabeledo]

In most EU countries and in the US, major wired network companies are already in the wireless market (T-Mobile, Vodafone, AT&T, etc.), so your take would make sense only if they were to stop laying fiber, and replace it with towers. To achieve this though, it would require a massive investment, especially to circumvent network congestion.

[grahamburger]

> To achieve this though, it would require a massive investment, especially to circumvent network congestion.

AKA: 5G

[manuelabeledo]

Not quite. It would require a massive investment on top of the current 5G deployment.

Replacing fiber, cable, or DSL with 5G in dense urban and suburban areas is definitely not what is currently under development.

[grahamburger]

The wireless distribution layer is really the only place mobile carriers are meaningfully bandwidth constrained. It's (relatively) easy and cheap to 10x or even 100x bandwidth available at a tower. The hard part is delivering that capacity to the end user. That's where 5G comes in.