One of the major things not really addressed in the article is backhaul for each 4.5G/5G cell site or small cell site. More air spectrum and better radio modulation/MIMO for the cell-to-handset is very important, but that's only a piece of the puzzle...<p>There's still a lot of locations out there without fiber, or that are currently fed by a 250-400Mbps capacity PTP microwave link. Cellular carriers are aggressively spending money to bring dark fiber to tower sites, of course, with the minimum connectivity for a new site being a single 10GbE circuit. This is one of the things driving the growth of outside-plant fiber construction and dedicated-purpose dark fiber network operators (example: Zayo's ongoing new builds spending $$$$$ in major metro areas in Texas).<p>The other part of the puzzle is much higher capacity new PTP microwave to feed sites, some of which will be logically downstream of newly fiber-fed sites. These new links will be at 1 Gbps to 5Gbps+ capacity.
As much as I like progress, one of the big hurdles 5G has is that 4G is mostly good enough.<p>The improvement from 3G to 4G was significant, but even then most people didn't care much. You got sub 20ms latency (my non-scientific tests show 14-19ms), much less jitter than 3G and sufficient bandwidth for most applications.<p>Why would people upgrade to 5G if they don't get any perceptible performance improvement?<p>4G is already good enough you can simply run remote desktop over it and get near local performance.<p>When the remote end is connected with an 1 Gbps+ link, who cares how much packet data bandwidth you got?