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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_.




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