[Drew68]

5g gives everyone the ability to watch junky Hollywood productions in 4K on their 6” smartphone screens without big phone bills. Big whoop.

Yours is a small-minded luddite position. This issue might not be of importance to you but it is to massive numbers of Americans. And 5G is way more than junky Hollywood productions.

The question is, does America want to lag behind China as a technological power or do we want to lead?

[Zhang Fei]

[The question is, does America want to lag behind China as a technological power or do we want to lead?]

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Buying malware-laden Chinese telco doesn’t make you a technological power. It’s a good way to hand over your trade secrets in all the other areas you’re ahead. If we think 5g is all that important, hold a contest with a $5b tax-free pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to the US company with the best product that can knock Huawei off its perch. The hype surrounding 5g is overblown. Whereas the dangers of using Huawei equipment are very real.

[Sirius Lee]

This issue might not be of importance to you but it is to massive numbers of Americans.

Link please.

[Lurker]

“And 5G is way more than junky Hollywood productions.”

The company I work for is heavily involved in building out the infrastructure to support 5G. And while 5G has some very real advantages to it there are also serious downsides, too. 5G has the potential to carry huge amounts of data but the drawback is drastically reduced signal range.

You literally need to put antennas every block and support every single antenna with fiber connections. In urban areas the cost to lay a single FOOT of fiber approaches $3,000. So while 5G will eventually be deployed in densely populated areas it’s not going to be cost feasible to roll it out anywhere but there. There’s simply no ROI. Not yet anyway.

Our Ops guys joke that we are actually a sidewalk and paving contractor that happens to leave fiber optic cable behind when we are done. And they’re right.

L