5G mmWave was big hype by big telecom -so many bought inferior and or more expensive phones for nothin.
The big telecoms and big tech companies need to be broken up. Consolidation doesn’t work.
LightReading - The plummeting value of 5G mmWave spectrum Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T and others spent billions of dollars in the early days of 5G on millimeter wave spectrum licenses. But the value of those licenses appears to be rapidly declining. Picture of Mike Dano Mike Dano, Editorial Director, 5G & Mobile Strategies November 20, 2024 T-Mobile received FCC approval to cut up some of its mmWave spectrum licenses into smaller geographic areas that are easier to cover. Giving up spectrum without any financial payback is virtually unheard of in the US 5G industry. Finally, it's worth noting that American operators are the only ones that ever chased mmWave spectrum licenses. "The price of US mmWave spectrum is about the highest in the world," Rayal told Light Reading. He noted that in most other countries where regulators have auctioned mmWave licenses, those licenses either went unsold or they sold at the minimum bid price. That's likely why Apple continues to eschew mmWave in its international products. As noted by MacRumors, all four of Apple's new iPhone 16 models offer mmWave 5G in the US but not in any other countries. Value in an era of scarcity. "I believe US mmWave spectrum was valued based on a mobile use case," Rayal explained. Verizon chased mmWave spectrum between 2017 and 2020 because 5G was on the horizon and the FCC did not make any other spectrum available at that time, according to Rayal. Verizon viewed the spectrum as suitable for mobile uses, like smartphones, rather than fixed uses like high-speed Internet for homes and offices. Then, when the FCC began auctioning midband C-band spectrum in 2021, Verizon pivoted to that type of spectrum with bids totaling $53 billion.
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Many people had noticed this hype was going nowhere — slowly.
The Verge - G’s false start is over and the iPhone SE proves it - By Sean Hollister Mar 9, 2022 But it now seems the millimeter-wave 5G carriers have been slinging from the start was just a gigantic head fake — a way to stay in the game until their actually useful 5G spectrum was ready. On Tuesday, Apple announced the 2022 iPhone SE, the first 5G iPhone for the United States that lacks the millimeter-wave 5G that AT&T and especially Verizon have doggedly insisted on for years. Instead of rejecting that iPhone or insisting that Apple make a special version for its millimeter-wave network, Verizon will simply... carry it.
I noticed this because I know someone who prefers the SE because of its size, and I looked into mmWave at the time and decided it wasn’t at all important with regards to this person’s use.
Devices were made less capable, and or more expensive, in order to support something that wasn’t even rolled out yet, and now never will be in any big way.
Verizon’s Samsung Galaxy S20 has mmWave 5G but less RAM / There are some compromises for this 5G smartphone By Taylor Lyles Jun 10, 2020 Samsung released a new model of the Galaxy S20 with support for Verizon’s Ultra Wideband millimeter-wave 5G network last week, but it turns out the device includes some compromises over the standard model. As spotted by Digital Trends, the Galaxy S20 5G UW has 8GB of RAM, which is 4GB less than the standard Galaxy S20. The Verizon model also does not include a microSD card slot, which allows owners to expand the phone’s storage capacity.
The people who believed conspiracy theories about covid and 5G I guess saved some money and frustration by accident.
Reddit - r/Android • Sept 20, 2020 iamvinoth Including expensive mmWave 5G on the Pixel 5 was a big mistake, Google. deleted user Oct 1, 2020 Currently its only purpose is for carriers to misrepresent what 5G will do for people. The thing is: mmWave is awesome for consumers, but its use case is very limited. It is GREAT for extremely dense situations like festivals, sports games, concerts and train stations: all huge open spaces with a huge amount of people that are pretty active on the mobile network. mmWave will enable those thousands of people to all have a stable fast conenction simultaniously, which simply is impossible now even with LTE-A. The things is: showing "you can still get 50 Mbps even with a ton of other people online" is less sexy than shouting "LOOK 20000 MBPS!!!!". Those speeds simply won't ever be realistic on 5G, but that is how the lying lazy corrupt idiots carriers chose to sell 5G.
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I feel bad for the rural people who avoid crowds but bought junkier phones because some marketing material or some sales person told them they needed mmWave 5G. I still see marketing material linked from various mobile providers insisting that you need a phone that's got mmWave 5G or you're doing it wrong.
Apple made an iPad Pro released back in May 2024, quietly leaving out mmWave, so they saw the writing on the wall awhile back.
Mac Rumors - New iPad Pro Lacks mmWave 5G and Ultra-Wide Camera Tuesday May 7, 2024 10:14 am PDT by Joe Rossignol While the iPad Pro was updated with the M4 chip and more today, the latest 11-inch and 13-inch models lack two features that are available on some previous models, including mmWave 5G support and an Ultra Wide camera.
I dunno, maybe having these big telecoms so consolidated isn’t such a great idea for actual practical application. Maybe consolidation just makes a bigger mess with missteps and a bigger target. Just like with school consolidation.
N2K Cyberwire - V3 | Issue 1 | 1.2.25 Caveat Briefing for 01.02.25 Last Friday, updates continued to emerge regarding the significant telecommunications cybersecurity breach. In this latest update, reports have detailed how the Chinese hacking campaign, known as Salt Typhoon, was able to both record phone calls at will and was able to use geolocation services to track millions of Americans. For greater context, this breach was initially discovered in September earlier this year, when the Wall Street Journal reported that these Chinese-affiliated hackers were able to breach several telecommunications providers gaining access to cell phone records as well as listening to conversations of top United States (US) political figures, including Donald Trump, JD Vance, and other top officials. Since this initial discovery, reports have continued to emerge, almost weekly, detailing the scope of this incident, which has now become known as the greatest telecommunications attack in the US to date. While it is still unclear how many Americans were impacted by this breach, Anne Neuberger, the Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology, highlighted how the US believes these phone tracking efforts centered around targeting citizens in the Washington, D.C. area. Neuberger also commented that “we believe it was the [hacking campaign’s] goal of identifying who those phones [belonged] to and if they were government targets of interest for follow-on espionage and intelligence collection of…texts and phone calls on those particular phones.” With this announcement, officials are still unable to confirm that if Chinese hackers have been fully removed from all telecommunications networks and are still unable to confirm the full scope and scale of the hacking campaign. The Knowledge. Aside from this update, other news has emerged surrounding this significant breach. Apart from gaining insights into the scale of the attack, Neuberger released another statement that expanded the scope of the attack highlighting that there was another telecommunications company that was compromised in this campaign, bringing the total number of companies impacted to nine. However, US officials have still not provided a comprehensive list of the impacted companies as well as how many Americans were impacted nor exactly what metadata was harvested by the attackers.
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My letter to reps:
Break up the big telecoms & big tech. Consolidation doesn’t work for society. Big mobile phone companies and the device makers went all in on selling people less capable technically inferior, and or more expensive phones just to see the abandonment and plummeting value of the 5G mmWave spectrum. When a hacker wants in, they get breached like the Salt Typhoon, and the damage is widespread. They lock customers into poor service with locked up devices that install things and send information to companies for marketing without the user’s permission, on devices that are less useful than they can be. I’m sick of it. Break 'em up!