The Race To 5G is Over - Now It's Time To Pay the Bill

Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found -- and the race to deploy the tech was costly in more ways than one. From a report: At CES in 2021, 5G was just about everywhere you looked. It was the future of mobile communications that would propel autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, and AR into reality. The low latency! The capacity! It'll change everything, we were told. Verizon and AT&T wrote massive checks for new spectrum licenses, and T-Mobile swallowed another network whole because it was very important to make the 5G future happen as quickly as possible and win the race.

CES 2024 is just around the corner, and while telecom executives were eager to shout about 5G to the rafters just a few years ago, you'll probably be lucky to hear so much as a whisper about it this time around. While it's true that 5G has actually arrived, the fantastic use cases we heard about years ago haven't materialized. Instead, we have happy Swifties streaming concert footage and a new way to get internet to your home router. These aren't bad things! But deploying 5G at the breakneck speeds required to win an imaginary race resulted in one fewer major wireless carrier to choose from and lots of debt to repay. Now, network operators are looking high and low for every bit of profit they can drum up -- including our wallets.

If there's a poster child for the whole 5G situation in the US, it's Verizon: the loudest and biggest spender in the room. The company committed $45.5 billion to new spectrum in 2021's FCC license auction -- almost twice as much as AT&T. And we don't have to guess whether investors are asking questions about when they'll see a return -- they asked point blank in the company's most recent earnings call. CEO Hans Vestberg fielded the question, balancing the phrases 'having the right offers for our customers' and 'generating the bottom line for ourselves,' while nodding to 'price adjustments' that also 'included new value' for customers. It was a show of verbal gymnastics that meant precisely nothing.

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