The cost of that victory, according to the BBC, is a 1 year delay in the rollout of 5G tech.
That's a pretty large economic cost. Bob can't watch his medical lectures on the train, so ends up behind in class, Mary's company looses a contract to a foreign competitor because she got frustrated with her bad VPN and didn't read over the bid one last time, Fred couldn't afford the cost of the new 5G contracts so didn't get much data and ended up losing touch with his friends who were all group video calling eachother.
All these socio-economic costs cascade for decades or more. Do they really outweigh the theoretical ability for another nation to disrupt network traffic for a few hours until a mitigation is put in place?
Existing 4G LTE connections work well enough for those use cases you listed; users will hardly notice any difference on 5G. The real benefit of 5G will be in the new types of applications it enables.
Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but assuming you aren't. No consumer is asking for 5g, and I don't think any consumer will realise the difference. And not sure that 5g can do much good on a train, unless the train circles around inside a big city and never goes in the countryside where what matters is antenna with long range.
but your wifi is unreliable and slow. Instead of buying a good AP, buy this 5G modem for only $5 and get your nice, capped 20MBit/s for $200 a month. Isn't this just what you need, when every site is slowly just getting a fibre-connection theoretically allowing a community hosted mobile mesh-network in any city which deserves the name.
My understanding is that 4g requires a lot more effort to provision more or less capacity as need arises. I've been to a few brownbags on the topic and I didn't fully understand it (it's not my area of expertise by many hops), but the big selling point the engineers were explaining to us was that they can effectively put telco equipment in cloud-like datacenters and spool up or spin down capacity much simpler than they can now. And then something about the tower-edge being far more advanced and able to be spooled up or down as need requires.
I live on an island near a metro with a lot of traffic when the ferry from the metro arrives, then it disappears. Every single ferry that comes in knocks out 4g responsiveness (or takes it down entirely) while the ferry disembarks until everyone moves away from that area.
So, for me, 5g has a projected material benefit (presuming my understanding of their brownbags were sufficient). I'd love to hear any actual cellular network engineers fully explain it because between words I didn't understand and trying to balance a salad and eat it without a table, I'm sure I misunderstood _something_.
upselling it to everyone not satisfied with shitty wifi from their shittiest telco-modem/router/AP-abomination. And squeezing the lemon in the process.
lately, more and more articles appear, which outline what's the real and actual economic cost of 5G: local area, decentral, unlicensed Wifi-networks should get replaced with a centrally managed and tunable (for $$$ or power) alternative. I suspected this for a long time, but now, more and more people are openly acknowledging it. While this is good for surveillance capitalism, it's not good for anyone else... (I'll happily add some refs, if I'm off the commute).
That's a pretty large economic cost. Bob can't watch his medical lectures on the train, so ends up behind in class, Mary's company looses a contract to a foreign competitor because she got frustrated with her bad VPN and didn't read over the bid one last time, Fred couldn't afford the cost of the new 5G contracts so didn't get much data and ended up losing touch with his friends who were all group video calling eachother.
All these socio-economic costs cascade for decades or more. Do they really outweigh the theoretical ability for another nation to disrupt network traffic for a few hours until a mitigation is put in place?