[Garvi]

> and yet another few million pieces of e-waste are generated

That's money generated while the e-waste is not factored in. I know I'm stating the obvious. But it's a problem with being realistic, as you start seeing idiosyncrasies everywhere: I run my household on 4g as I can reach realistic speeds of 100Mb/s. Theoretically that goes up to 150Mb/s. A 4k stream (compressed without visual loss) requires 15Mb/s. So 10 people in a household could simultaneously watch 4k content.

Did I fail at math? Why does anyone need 5g? What for?

[rcxdude]

Well, ironically, 5g is much better designed for such small devices to connect to the cell network: it can support lower-power devices and they take a lot less network resources. 5G is an infrastructure upgrade more than a consumer upgrade (consumer benefit is incidental: the network is less congested, especially in denser areas)

[bonton89]

Basically it is so your smart TV can upload all your watch information without getting you to cough up your wifi password. Soon when you buy a toilet seat it will have a 5G modem in it and upload your bowel movement information to the cloud automatically. The possibilities are endless.

[andmarios]

I run my household on 4G too. I live at the center of the town. My ”realistic” speeds with a CAT4 LTE router are 4-34mbps. My guess for this range, is that other people are using the network too, so I cannot get the max bandwidth all the time. I also own a CAT6 LTE router (serving currently another house), which doubles the bandwidth, so around 8-68mpbs, quite better. With a 5G router I expect quadruple speeds, so around 32-270mbps.

Now we finally reach a usable area, where I can zoom or netflix anytime during the day. :)

[hotpotamus]

I felt the same way during the 5G hype phase. There were all kinds of sales pitches about how it would enable new applications, but I never really got what more bandwidth was supposed to accomplish.

[bombcar]

5G boils down to “cell phones will continue to work in dense cities” and not really anything consumers care about beyond that.