this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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[–] invalidusernamelol@hexbear.net 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The spec seems to just be loosely following powers of 2 on transmission speeds.

2G - Kb/s

3G - Mb/s

4G - 100Mb/s

5G - 1Gb/s

6G - 10Gb/s (proposed, 1Km in tests)

What people don't understand is that all of this is realistically built on massive underground fiber optic networks that have been being built out since ~2006.

China is getting ahead of everyone because their national projects tend to also be infrastructural so they can put hundreds of millions of meters of fiber cables underground during the build out of those new transit lines and residential centers.

5G and 6G are presented as wireless technology, but they're more wired than anything else. The high frequencies required for those speeds mean you need antennas/towers like every 500m instead of every mile or 2 for the lower frequency tech (3G and 4G).

Because the only federal and state fiber buildouts in the US are a long major highways, you have a freeway backbone that can support high wireless speed networks, but no one lives on the highway and the short distances mean not even that many people can take advantage of that until FTTH distribution (almost entirely privately owned and state subsidized) is built.