The U.S. cellular industry has never figured out a way to monetize 5G. I think back to the early days of the 5G pronouncements when the new technology promised to usher in an age of smart cities, self-driving cars, virtual reality, and the ubiquitous computer in the cloud that would follow us everywhere. It was an alluring vision, but almost none of those great things ever happened beyond the occasional demo.

The only place that might have swallowed the 5G story even more strongly than here was South Korea. Rather than just talk about 5G, the carriers there invested heavily and early into network upgrades that brought faster cellular speeds. In terms of deployment, South Korea is ahead of the world. The average 5G cellular speed in the country in 2022 was 896 Mbps download.

Like in the U.S., the original deployment of 5G was underwhelming. The three carriers in in the county – SK Telecom, KT, and LG Uplus – made claims about speed upgrades and applications that were slow to materialize. None of the companies wanted to go all-in for a technology for which there was no obvious revenue stream, so each was slow to make upgrades. The hype quickly outgrew the reality.

But over time, the companies made incremental upgrades to goose speeds to today’s near-gigabit speeds. Like in the U.S., one of the challenges was spectrum. 5G was kickstarted in Korea with 3.5 GHz mid-range spectrum. The industry then looked at 28 GHz millimeter wave spectrum for developing superfast speeds.

After a lot of trials, the carriers eventually rejected the widespread use of millimeter wave spectrum for the same reasons it’s not been used here. While the bandwidth potential is gigantic, the distance limitations for the spectrum in the wild limit the usefulness outside of unique situations like stadiums.

In a move that would never happen here, the Fair Trade Commission in South Korea fined the three wireless carriers almost $25 million for making exaggerated advertising claims. The claimed speeds could only be achieved with millimeter wave spectrum in controlled situations but were not available to the average customer. If that sounds familiar, think back to the Verizon ads on TV in the early days of 5G that showed a cell phone receiving gigabit-plus broadband speeds. While those speeds were real, a customer had to have a specialized phone and only use it outdoors in a tiny portion of several major city business districts.

The motivation for originally stressing 5G was different in both countries. In Korea, the original 5G craze was in response to a customer base that is fanatical about gaming. The carriers touted that 5G networks would provide fast, low-latency connections that would allow gamers to play from anywhere (at least in cities). Any public disappointment in 5G there is due to not meeting that claim.

I’ve speculated on the U.S. 5G craze for many years. The best explanation I’ve figured out is U.S. carriers had a huge bandwidth deficit and decided to create the 5G craze as a way to pressure the FCC into giving them more spectrum. I speculate that the companies didn’t want to openly talk about their networks being in crisis to protect their stock prices. And did they ever sell the story! I think the marketing folks took the 5G story and ran with it to a bigger extent than the carriers had envisioned. For a year or two, 5G was the primary topic in the industry.

U.S. carriers got what they wanted, and the FCC speeded up auctions for the new frequencies that we now refer to as 5G. While U.S. cellular speeds are nowhere close to the 900 Mbps in South Korea, in most U.S. cities the speeds are now between 150-200 Mbps.

You may wonder why speed matters since most cell phone functions don’t require a superfast speed. Faster speeds benefit of the network. Fast speed reduces the time that a given customer is using the cellular network, making the network available to make many more connections throughout the day.

U.S. carriers still need more spectrum to keep up with the mad growth curve for cellular demand. The industry has recently started hyping 6G as the solution for the future – but that means stepping into the millimeter wave spectrum that South Korea has already tried and rejected. I hope we don’t see the same overblown rhetoric that we saw with the 5G craze – but nothing the cellular marketers do would surprise me.