Welcome to 2019, where you will find aggressively marketed to you a new upgrade in Wi-Fi called “Wi-Fi 6” and just about every mobile provider will try to sell you some “new, exciting, 5G service!” But funny thing. If you buy a new “Wi-Fi 6” wireless router you know exactly what you’re getting. It supports the latest IEEE 802.11ax protocol, operating on existing Wi-Fi frequencies of 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, and any other frequencies listed on the package. (You can see a summary of how 802.11ax differs from 802.11ac here.) By contrast, not only does the term “5G” tell you nothing about the capabilities (or frequencies, for them what care) of the device, but what “5G” means will vary tremendously from carrier to carrier. So while you can fairly easily decide whether you want a new Wi-Fi 6 router, and then just buy one from anywhere, you are going to want to very carefully and very thoroughly interrogate any mobile carrier about what their “5G” service does and what limitations (including geographic limitations) it has.
Why the difference? It’s not simply that we live in a world where the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lets mobile carriers get away with whatever marketing hype they can think up, such as selling “unlimited” plans that are not, in fact unlimited. It has to do with the fact that back in the early 00s, the unlicensed spectrum/Wi-Fi community decided to solve the confusion problem by eliminating confusion, whereas the licensed/mobile carrier world decided to solve the confusion problem by embracing it. As I explain below, that wasn’t necessarily the wrong decision given the nature of licensed mobile service v. unlicensed. But it does mean that 5G will suffer from Forest Gump Syndrome for the foreseeable future. (“5G is like a box of chocolates, you never know what to expect.”) It also means that, for the foreseeable future, consumers will basically need to become experts in a bunch of different technologies to figure out what flavor of “5G” they want, or whether to just wait a few years for the market to stabilize.
More below . . . .