“We need to build a crescendo,” says Amon. Qualcomm obviously has a vested interest in making people believe that 5G is actually meaningfully better than the cell connections we already have now. “You’re not going to change your phone unless the battery life is higher, the form factor is attractive, and you need companies that can actually deliver the performance,” he says. (Early LTE devices were notoriously thick and drained batteries quickly.)That’s why, even out of the gate, he says 5G will be dramatically faster and dramatically more responsive, to the point that bandwidth-sapping uses like streaming video will feel effortless.

“Today you stream music everywhere. You don’t download music anymore; even if you have low coverage, you have enough quality to stream music. 5G will do that for video,” Amon says, before moving on to fancier, further-out predictions like unlimited storage and on-demand processing power from the cloud that can, he imagines, virtually cram the power of a Magic Leap-like augmented reality headset into a normal pair of glasses.High-flying promises of fast internet and cloud connections are nothing new, but historically they have always crashed into the reality of actual network performance that doesn’t live up to them. And the way that Qualcomm, AT&T, Verizon, and others hope to achieve the performance out of the gate may mean a slightly different, spottier network than the ones we’re used to right now.

AT&T and Verizon both say they’re exclusively rolling out millimeter wave (mmWave) radios, which inherently provide far more bandwidth and capacity than today’s networks. But at 39GHz and 28GHz, those millimeter wave signals also don’t travel as far or penetrate buildings as easily as conventional cellular. That means you’ll probably drop down to LTE speeds when you transition indoors, and in order to cover the same area as today’s LTE cell towers, carriers will need to provide many more smaller cell sites. AT&T says it’s focusing on outdoor cells first, but is also looking at indoor ones for public venues like stadiums and concert halls.5G NR does have a solve for wider coverage, too: “sub-6” spectrum, meaning radio frequencies below 6GHz, which include everything from traditional Wi-Fi (2.4GHz, 5GHz) down to the decently building-penetrating 700MHz frequency that AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon use for a large portion of their LTE networks today. (T-Mobile recently added some 600MHz as well.)

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But AT&T and Verizon say they aren’t prioritizing sub-6 5G quite yet, partly because the carriers don’t have enough spectrum at lower frequencies to wow with speed. “With a 20MHz band of 600MHz [spectrum], you’re not going to get that lift. You’d have to ask yourself what’s different, what does 5G really mean,” says Verizon’s Palmer.It also might be partially because sub-6 smartphone chips may not be ready yet, at least for the particular spectrum pairings that US carriers currently use. “The FDD, which is what the bulk of operators have ... the silicon to support that FDD spectrum doesn’t become available until later in 2019,” says Gordon Mansfield, AT&T’s VP of converged access and device technology.

The upshot? Instead of promising to launch their 5G NR networks in entire cities at once, AT&T has only committed to bringing 5G to unspecified “parts” of the 19 locations it’s named so far, and the fastest forms of 5G may never cover every person. “Our ambition is large... that doesn’t mean we’re going to blanket every corner of the country with millimeter wave,” says Palmer, adding that she will “most likely” start in areas with the most traffic and demand, too. T-Mobile says it will have a nationwide 5G network in 2020, but it's not clear how much of that will be millimeter wave and how much sub-6. It's using both.
The first of many times you’ll probably see the 5G service indicator on a phone. It’s from an early Verizon test of the 5G Moto Mod. Photo: Verizon

None of this means your device will just drop off the network when you’re out of 5G range, though. AT&T and others say they are building their 5G NR tech on top of existing 4G LTE to start. Your devices will be connected to both LTE and 5G NR simultaneously and switch between them seamlessly, says Mansfield.

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Plus, both AT&T and Verizon expect current LTE networks to get faster as 5G rolls out — partly because people moving to 5G will free up room on the LTE networks, partly because of all the underlying infrastructure improvements the carriers are making to ensure their 5G networks will be faster, and partly because we still haven’t reached the limit of what LTE can do. AT&T even launched a fake 5G network called “5G Evolution” last year to show off how existing LTE Advanced and LTE Advanced Pro techniques could reach theoretical download speeds of 400Mbps. (Other carriers rolled out those techniques even earlier, though.)TL;DR: not all 5G will be equal, the faster flavor of 5G will come first but it’ll be spotty, and the rest of the time you’ll probably be surfing on LTE. But at least it could be faster LTE than you’re getting today.

When it comes to cell phone plans, 2018 is the year the word “unlimited” lost all meaning, as marketers realized they could twist it however they like. Verizon now has three unlimited plans! And every unlimited plan has limits.So consider me a wee bit concerned that on the eve of AT&T’s launch, neither AT&T nor Verizon was willing to talk about how much, how often, how fast, nor answer what’s probably the most burning question: whether we should expect to pay more, less, or the same for 5G connectivity. (Because 5G’s inevitable, right? You’ll be paying for it sooner or later.)For that matter, neither carrier would even tell me whether today’s data caps might get larger to account for the tremendous amount of data we’ll supposedly be using on 5G. I figured that would be a softball question, but they deflected anyhow.
“5G ushers in a new era of how to consume wireless services,” Palmer told me, pointing out that alternative business models might make sense for, say, a 5G cloud gaming service. “You as a customer would purchase that in a different way.”