5G may be overhyped. But it's an inevitable requirement for the future.
It's only sensible to assume that, in the next 10-15 years, we will:
- Have more cellular devices online.
- Have more cellular devices per person/household (e.g. smartphones, smartwatches, GPS trackers, cars, smart meters, etc. etc. etc.)
- Those cellular devices will thus be more densely packed and need to share bandwidth.
- Some of those cellular devices will require greater speeds than are available today. Whether that's people streaming 4K movies, playing VR, website HTML sizes increasing, more live-streaming of video, or whatever, it's a reasonable assumption that they will use - on average - more data than today.
As such, 5G is necessary. For nothing else than it's capability to support more devices in the same areas using more frequency bands, with the total speed available to share out from each mast having to be more than at the moment.
It's not that people are complaining - people are satisfied. But you only need one "fad" (think "Pokemon Go / Tamagotchi / etc. but with something cellular-based") and if you have failed to prepare, the whole network will collapse for even today's use. And naturally there will be more things online tomorrow than today. Fail to prepare for that, and everyone's current capacity drops in proportion to the number of new devices. How long before you're buying a "Netflix box" or Amazon Fire Stick that directly streams over 4/5G and doesn't need to connect to your wifi at all? Especially with eSim technology, they could easily do that, and thus bypass issues with other cellular providers or their backhaul providers.
It's an inevitable and necessary upgrade. Hence, why people would hype it up, I can't understand.
I live my life via a 4G Wifi box and a smartphone. I literally do not have a landline connection (despite there being one in the property, it would cost more to activate and use, to provide a slower connection than I already get over 4G). If I can live your entire digital life without ADSL/VDSL/Cable today, then 4G is already viable to do this on. 5G just means that EVERYONE would be able to do so. I game, I stream, I have a SIP phone, etc. etc. Nobody even notices, you just join my wifi from a little box and you're "online". They even question the need for the box because I could just "hotspot" from my phone, they say. They know that... they use it themselves.
5G could easily make your "Internet" connection travel with you (so you can check your plane tickets from work, for instance, without filters getting in the way), and make landlines obsolete. It's far from a useless leap in technology (unlike, say, 4K/8K/HDR/etc. which will still sell millions of devices alone).
Literally, my only hope is that, with the new speeds and high-capacity, data prices will drop. I can get 40Gb for £22 a month. I actually use 90Gb a month on that package (it doesn't include certain streaming services). I really could easily burn through 400Gb in a month if I had the money to do so. There's no technical reason in the way of me doing so at all, even in the middle of a large city inside the M25, sharing the "connection" capacity with all the neighbours and anyone who walks past with a smartphone.
But if 5G gives me bigger data allowances, greater speed, and a more resilient connection using more frequencies, I'll buy into it. Whether that's a 5G SIM in my existing 4G box, or whether that's buying a special 5G Wifi box with eSIM, I know that I'd end up getting it.