Verizon offers taste of 5G as it expands network trials – CNET (Feb 22, 2017)
Though the headline doesn’t do it, the article itself makes appropriate use of quotation marks around “5G” – there is no official standard for 5G yet, so everything being rolled out or trialled in the meantime is pre-5G based on companies’ anticipation of what the standards will say. We’re very much in the marketing phase of 5G at this point – for the reasons just stated, no-one can actually roll out 5G yet, and everything that is being rolled out is very much in the trial stages rather than production rollout, but that’s not stopping companies like Verizon from issuing lots of press releases about it as a way of establishing perceived leadership in this space. As with previous generations of mobile technology, there are multiple phases that need to happen before real people start seeing real benefits in real numbers: the standards have to be finalized, network equipment vendors need to release standards-based equipment, carriers have to deploy that equipment into their networks at scale, and most importantly end user or customer premise devices need to begin incorporating the technology. We’re years away from mass deployment still. The good news is that LTE has tons of runway left ahead of it in terms of increased speeds; the bad news is that we’ll all get so bombarded with 5G marketing in the interim that many people won’t recognize it when it actually arrives.
via CNET
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