[lillecarl]

What's so incredibly expensive about the 5G rollout that wasn't the case for "3G/4G"? You replace/mount more radios, make sure you have backhaul to carry the traffic.

I have no idea what the radios cost, but one thing that's for sure is that networking gear isn't that expensive. I know a guy that runs a teeny IX where everyone gets a 100GB port, because it's not that expensive.

Once you start doing stateful packet introspection, that's when price goes through the roof.

[tennis_80]

5G masts cover a significantly smaller area than 4G, so you need a lot more to provide the same coverage.

[BenjiWiebe]

Not exactly. 5G also can use the same frequencies as 4G with a slightly better range.

You only need lots of towers if you want blazing fast speeds everywhere. Out in the country they won't be putting up towers every mile.

[lillecarl]

Once the 3G network is dead we can reuse that low-freq bands for 5G with similar range. You only use the high-freq high-bandwidth radios in populated areas.

https://youtu.be/0faCad2kKeg this is Wendover Productions explanation of cell service, there's an error regarding ultra high-freq when he means ultra low-freq, other than that it's a good explanation of how RF works.

An important bit here is that 3G is 16 combinations and 5G is 1000+, this is why it's important to deprecate old tech, we need to reuse frequencies.