Since the first cellular network was switched on in Japan in the late 1970s, advances in mobile communications have happened in periodic bursts rather than steady increments. Every decade or so, the industry unleashed a new wireless standard upon the world. Each spurred its own cycle of innovation and investment as companies raced one another to develop new functions and capabilities using the technology, confident that consumers would pay extra for them. Money then poured in to pay for the next network-upgrade cycle.
Today, that engine has stalled. Carriers paid governments more than $150 billion from 2018 through 2024 to access the radio frequencies needed for fifth-generation wireless networks, known as 5G, and have spent even more than that again to install them. To lure the public, marketing departments went into overdrive. 5G wouldn’t just allow you to do more stuff on your smartphone. It would change your life. 5G was sold as the vital enabler of technologies such as robotics, autonomous vehicles and virtual reality. Doctors would be able to perform surgery remotely, and self-driving cars communicating via 5G would consign traffic jams to history. 5G would allow people to interact with one another in a parallel online “metaverse.” Manufacturing production lines, domestic appliances and almost any kind of electronic device would tap into these lightning-speed networks, making them work more autonomously and efficiently.
Six years into the rollout, there’s not much to see for all the hype. 5G has boosted network capacity so wireless operators can cope with growing data traffic. But even as a way to turbo-charge video streaming while on the go, it’s often patchy and unreliable. In many countries, cellphone users still rely mostly on the previous 4G standard and sometimes even 3G, which is more than two decades old. When “5G” does pop up in the corner of your smartphone screen, there’s sometimes scarce difference in performance. Some users even say their device is slower than before.
So what went wrong?

The marketing buzz for 5G was about trying to show what the technology could do. It turned out, no one was much interested.
“The biggest issue was there was no killer app,” said Yang Wang, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research in London.
Doctors still prefer to operate on patients while they’re in the same room. Most emerging self-driving car technologies have been designed without 5G as an absolute requirement. (That’s probably for a good reason: 5G reception along major roads can be patchy at best…Read more