Chaim Gartenberg

T-Mobile announced another expansion of its 2.5GHz midband 5G network, which is now available in dozens of new cities, nearly doubling the coverage of its last major midband rollout 

There’s a lot of pieces that need to come together to get 5G networks to work on mobile devices — new standards need to be agreed on, new modems need to be developed, and new networking hardware for towers needs to be rolled out. But Qualcomm might have just cleared one of the major hurdles with the announcement of its new QTM052 mmWave antenna modules, the first that have been announced that will enable the high-speed swath of networking spectrum to work with mobile phones. That’s a big deal, because not all 5G is created equal.

1. What exactly did Google do wrong here? The European Commission has ruled that Google has been unfairly using Android (which Google owns and develops) to push Google Search (which makes up most of Google’s business) on users, giving them an unfair and uncompetitive advantage.

There's finally a finished 5G standard. The 3GPP — the international group that governs cellular standards — officially signed off on the standalone 5G New Radio (NR) spec. It’s another major step toward next-generation cellular networks finally becoming a reality. There’s still more work to be done to finalize things. The real work will be waiting for the entire industry to build the hardware, infrastructure, chips, modems, phones, and antennas that will actually work with 5G. Don’t forget the massive undertaking of actually rolling out those new networks across the globe.

A primer on 5G.

The 2017 Mobile World Congress trade show kicks off next week, and in addition to the plethora of new smartphones, 5G network news is expected to show up in a big way. But what exactly is 5G? Is that the same as gigabit networks? LTE Advanced? Is the whole thing just a marketing trick, like when AT&T and T-Mobile renamed HSPA+ as “4G” data to cover for their lack of LTE support? In the simplest possible definition, 5G is the fifth generation of cellular networking. It’s the next step in mobile technology, what the phones and tablets of the future will use for data, and it should make our current LTE networks as slow and irrelevant as 3G data seems now.