Tell Me Lies, 5G, Sweet Little Lies
By Kent R. Lundgren, VP of Sales and Marketing
By now many 5G followers have watched Business Insider Producer Elizabeth McCauley’s hit piece, “You’re Being Lied to About 5G”, released on March 15, 2025. Over the next six days the YouTube video generated 724,000 views and 2,425 comments from those feeling misled by carriers. McCauley chastised the carriers for generating a poor return on investment and questioned the value of Winning the Race for 5G promoted by politicians seeking infrastructure projects1. Then she accused equipment suppliers like Ericsson and Nokia of seeking a “payday”.
That got the attention of Ericsson’s Sebastian Barros, who posted a rebuttal reminding everyone that 5G – NSA 5G at that – has given consumers unequivocally faster and better service for less money – as illustrated by McCauley herself in Figure 1. Barros agreed that 5G was overhyped, but didn’t apologize for it.
Neither side, however, mentioned that one of 5G’s biggest success stories, Fixed Wireless Access (FWA), could not have occurred without the $87 billion that Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, DISH and US Cellular spent on C-band spectrum from 2020 to 2023. OpenSignal’s chart (Figure 2) indicates that the carriers wasted no time putting 5G FWA into action. Revenues in 2020 started at about $100 million, and Inside Towers expects them to grow to $10.9 billion in 20282.
McCauley criticized another 5G cornerstone, mmWave, as impractical because the frequencies “don’t travel as far.” The truth is that mmWave frequencies travel far enough for most applications, but not through or around obstacles like sub-6 GHz frequencies can. This represents a paradigm shift that carriers must now address with advanced mmWave repeaters, high resolution RF planning tools and field scanners. Pivotal predicts that mmWave will play a greater role in not only stadiums, but also FWA net adds for T-Mobile and Verizon (Figure 3). Verizon is piloting mmWave to serve MDUs, for example, because it offers more bandwidth than C-band spectrum3. FWA customers typically consume more data than mobile customers, and their data usage can spike together during certain times of the day.
1Politics notwithstanding, the US winning the "4G race" meant significant economic benefits, including job creation, increased app store revenue for US companies, and overall GDP growth, solidifying the US as a leader in the wireless industry. There is no reason to believe that 5G benefits will be any less impactful.
2“Fixed Wireless Access – A Continuing 5G Success Story,” by Inside Towers, November 27, 2024.
3“New Street Research BCG Connectivity Conference,” comments by Frank Boulben, Chief Revenue Officer, Verizon Consumer Group, edited transcript, page 8.