2023-12-09, 06:32 PM
The race to 5G is over — now it’s time to pay the bill
Quote:Networks spent years telling us that 5G would change everything. But the flashiest use cases are nowhere to be found — and the race to deploy the tech was costly in more ways than one.
Quote:5G will improve as time marches on as it tends to, particularly when the networks have fully deployed standalone 5G. But we can probably stop holding our breath for that killer app and make peace with the fact that technological progress is often slow and boring — moving forward cell tower by cell tower, not by leaps and bounds. In the short term, its greatest effect might be a more consolidated, more expensive wireless broadband market. If it’s any consolation, you can take some comfort in the fact that we probably won’t be seeing commercials for 6G anytime soon
Quote:Maybe 5G isn’t entirely smoke and mirrors. But by rolling it out with a breakneck “race,” networks backed themselves into a corner. They took on piles of debt; on that recent earnings call, a Verizon exec talked about the company’s desire to return to pre-spectrum-auction levels of debt. In the meantime, there are few returns to show for those investments — not helped by the fact that interest levels are high and smartphone sales are down. The networks thought they had a golden goose with 5G, but so far, it’s just laying regular old eggs — expensively, at that. And while they’re waiting for their efforts to bear fruit, they’re looking for other ways to boost their bottom line.
The simplest way to make more money is what Verizon calls “pricing actions.” That’s a nice way of saying “charging customers more.” The company boasted about implementing “over one billion dollars of annualized pricing actions in 2023” and pats itself on the back for keeping churn — that would be customers ditching Verizon — low in spite of it.