5G’s rollout is confusing, uneven, and rife with problems

2020 looks like it will be your year to get 5G—but only in the sense of having that signal on your phone, not in the sense of knowing quite what it’s supposed to be or using it to its full potential. A new report from the network analysis firm Opensignal advises that while this revamp of mobile broadband is poised to reach far more of the US, it will do so in ways that may leave both carriers and their customers feeling some wireless whiplash. The former won’t be able to provide it at the speed and over the coverage area they’d like; the latter will have to puzzle through wildly varying versions of 5G available to them that might not solve today’s hangups with streaming video. The uneven availability of 5G speed and spectrum suggest that US carriers won’t be able to lift their caps on the resolution of streaming video, their current attempt to keep video traffic from eating up all of their bandwidth.