The legacy of 3G is paving the way for a new set of wireless services. The challenge of 5G is inventing new ones.
Getty Images / iStockphoto
The story continues, but a Chapter is ending. Last month, AT&T became the first major US carrier turn off its 3G mobile network. T-Mobile will be next to go, followed by Verizon later this year. With 3G traffic representing a fraction of the traffic on their networks, all three service providers have an incentive to reuse spectrum allocated to 3G as they continue to build out their 5G networks while improving performance of 4G network. In doing so, they have reaped what was once an exciting hearth to nurture a future that has hitherto sparked a collective humiliation from consumers.
3G offers the first taste of transformative power wireless data. Certainly, none of us would rather go back to its capabilities than we would to a dial-up modem connection for home internet access; The pandemic would have been even worse without Zoom’s in-flight remote access to friends and family and the vanity of TikTok, prime examples of 4G mobile apps. But while it may have proved surprisingly slow, 3G has opened the door to many of today’s most popular mobile applications: rich messaging, photo sharing, mobile web access, music streaming. online and guided navigation. It’s not just that it’s fast enough for many of these applications; Its persistence allowed us to take connectivity for the first time for a while.
When iPhone launched before 3G and Apple’s first 3G model that overwhelmed AT&T’s network, its all-screen design will set the standard for future devices, a “tabula glass-a” that can accommodate any data network Any cell phone can throw at it. By the time LTE started rolling out, people knew they wanted everything 3G delivered, but faster. Wireless data is becoming mainstream.
Now that wireless data has become so integrated into our lives, however, it’s hard for carriers to ignite the same level of enthusiasm for 5G. Part of this is because the broad expectations of 5G depend on the trade-offs of the potential speed ranges in different frequency deployments – the marginal improvements of today’s 4G spectrum deployments compared to today’s 4G spectrum deployments. The gorgeous but severely limited millimeter wave deployment that carriers currently have, and the mid-band deployment that the US has lagged behind. Due to disparity, some of the most interesting 5G applications have been confined to the stadiums where 5G has been deployed. But in terms of where the perceived value lies, carriers have been promoting 5G capabilities not only for as broad a business applications as they have always been, but also specifically for industrial and manufacturing applications.
Yes, there are possibilities that appeal to consumers. In 2019, I wrote about Magic Leap’s Vision about how augmented reality, 5G’s best killer candidate, can infiltrate our lives. That’s a scenario that could lead to the impact of 5G being even more profound than 4G’s (though it was Meta, not Magic Leap, that took up that shell for it). better or worse).
But it is difficult to explain this value to consumers because, unlike so many possibilities that have evolved in 3G and 4G, there is no widely understood digital precedent. On previous mobile networks, satisfaction often came from doing things on mobile that we used to have to do over wired broadband. (Indeed, carriers are touting fixed 5G as an alternative to that.) Even before we were all guiding our trips with Apple Maps and Google Maps, people were already planning routes. in the browser with Mapquest and navigate with a dedicated Garmin navigation device. Indeed, some of the ways 5G will likely improve our lives has more to do with how it will improve infrastructure, such as self-driving vehicles, rather than connecting tap and knock targets. individuals, part of the AI-driven shift toward computers that act on behalf of the people we run.
But in terms of how we understand the value of wireless connectivity today, most of the recent consumer applications are geared towards incremental improvements: higher resolution video, low latency gaming than. Nearly everything we once dreamed of doing remotely with a connected PC – communicate, collaborate, entertain, commerce, pay – has now become the norm. The legacy of 3G is paving the way for a new set of wireless services. The challenge of 5G is inventing new ones.
