Let's face it, we have too many Gs in our world these days. Wifi comes in 2G,5G and now 6G, which all refer to GHz. Phones come in 3G, 4G and now 5G, which refer to 'Generation'. If you work in the world of Genomics like me, then you end up dealing with Gigabases and, often, Gigabytes, which are yet more Gs. I think that IEEE needs to impose a worldwide moratorium on the use of Gs in technology names. It's getting to be a bit much.
On a serious note, it's hard to find a legitimate need for 5G in the consumer market of 2021. Typical demonstrations feature a tech blogger standing next to a telephone pole, downloading a movie in just 1 minute over 5G. It's impressive and also pointless. I have never had a problem streaming movies over Netflix on my phone directly using 5MBPS of bandwidth. On the rare occasion that I actually need to download a movie or show to my phone because I anticipate some sort of (ironic) gap in the global blanket of Internet connectivity while I'm traveling, etc., I have no problem taking the 2 minutes+ required to do so. For more legitimate scenarios like conference calls, I also have no problem with using 4G or just dialing in using my good old fashion voice connection for audio. If someone like me has no need for 5G then why on earth would anyone else need it?
Why, also, would cell phone companies want to foist 5G on naive consumers, convincing them that they really need gigabit data connections on their phones (when most of us don't even have this at home)? I think the answer to this, as with most new technologies these days, probably has to do with consumer data collection. To greatly simplify things, 5G adoption will basically flatten the consumer Internet topology, which is currently complicated by the widespread use of things like WIFI access points, often employing NAT routing and causing consumers to annoyingly change their IP from time to time, making it more difficult for companies to continuously track them over time. In the future, there will be no need for such technologies as each one of our devices will be capable of directly connecting to the gigabit-delivering 5G access point on our corner, leaving a single, traceable identifier for each consumer device. We will gradually find our new TVs, tablets, laptops and phones bypassing our home networks entirely, routing traffic straight to our ISP, who will helpfully monitor our browsing habits through the uninterrupted high-resolution click stream from each of our devices to deliver the content (and, more importantly, ads) which we have shown ourselves to be interested in. This is the real value of 5G technology.
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