5G IS THE FUTURE
A DECADE AGO, the iPhone was still a novelty. Apple’s App Store was barely a year old. Online gaming required consoles or computers, Wi-Ficonnections, and power outlets. Your phone could make calls and receive emails, but it would be two years before Facebook even had a mobile app.
Today your phone is a portal to entertainment and essential services, from online games to driving directions to health care records, all of which is available to you just about anywhere.
Less than a decade from now, an even better wireless internet system might let you play a console-quality game on your phone, then click an app to video chat with a physician who can read your vital signs and prescribe medication—all without leaving your house, or perhaps while zipping around town in an autonomous vehicle.
The fourth generation of wireless telecommunications technology, or “4G,” allowed for streaming video, integrated mapping apps such as Waze, and an explosion in social media, from Snapchat to Instagram—though few people would have predicted those specific developments when 4G debuted about a decade ago.
With “5G,” the possibilities are bigger and weirder. But the leap to the next level of mobile internet connectivity will require a complete overhaul of the infrastructure that’s formed the backbone of cellphone networks for the past two decades. New antennas will communicate with faster microchips inside your phone, using a new type of signal in previously unused bandwidth. Some wireless companies are already selling “5G-ready” devices and marketing their networks as ready to “evolve” to 5G.
For now, those are mostly marketing ploys. Even if your phone says it’s 5G E, you are not actually experiencing the new network yet. A tiny number of cities have small 5G networks up and running, But as with 4G, the really cool stuff will take more time.
That is, if the government doesn’t make a mess of it.
Upgrading existing cellphone networks to 5G will require cooperation from local governments and a hands-off approach from Washington. Unfortunately, the many ways in which modern telecommunications technology intersects with the government’s regulatory, economic, and security concerns—and, increasingly, how it figures into the geopolitical “race” between the U.S. and China—provide ample opportunity for bureaucratic interference. All of which means that 5G technology has become the latest battlefield for an age-old struggle between the forces of stasis and of innovation.
“There’s about every geopolitical, technical, and economic angle you can imagine,” says Shane Tews, a tech policy fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. That
