1/ "I don’t feel the difference,” said Mr. Jang, who uses a 5G-enabled Samsung handset. On many days he switches off his 5G service altogether because his connection often drops as his phone pingpongs between 5G and the existing 4G LTE network."
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2/ 5G is an over-the-air standard called “New Radio" (NR) which isn't backward compatible with LTE, so non-"stand alone" 5G must incorporate both LTE and NR. Stand alone 5G is still in development mostly and is a long way from deployment at scale.
3/ 5G also improves channel bandwidths and spectrum flexibility (e.g., 100MHz channels in almost any frequency, channel bonding across different bands and use of millimeter wave frequencies). But the shorter the wavelength, the shorter the transmission range at a given power.
4/ Unit economics can get better with greater receiver sensitivity, transmit power and antenna gain. More base stations and fiber optic cable needed to serve them increase cost. 5G coverage will often be limited since propagation of signal is challenging. In short, it depends.
5/ The most importantly change with 5G is networks will be programmable since their core is now composed of software running on a rack of servers (bare metal) accessible via APIs. This isn't new for the world, but it is new for wireless networks. But this won't happen tomorrow.
