To me, one of the biggest things here is the focus on lower latency. Sustained speeds are great, but latency is really the problem with current 4G.<p>They cite that LTE cells have about 20ms latency. Adding a 20ms overhead to every connection adds up fast.
Spectral efficiency(bits/hz or bps/hz), a major thing that determines cost, is similar or just 20% better than 4G.<p>An alternative is using mmWaves, but those require line of sight, so not sure how useful are those to mobile phones.