Overprovisioning and Faster Speeds are Sort of Related Customer Responses

Disappointing 5G speeds are a common complaint one hears, and the complaint often is justified, especially when mobile service providers use low-band spectrum for coverage and do not have plenty of mid-band spectrum. 

In such cases, as was the situation for early 5G deployment in much of the United States, actual experienced speeds for 5G were about the same as for 4G, and in some cases 4G might have been faster. 

But development within each mobile generation continues while each generation is in its prime, with the result that typical speeds tend to increase for each mobile network generation.

That clearly was the case for 3G and 4G, and technologists already are working on a 5.5G standard that will boost 5G downstream speeds by an order of magnitude. 

That has been the experience in the 3G and 4G eras as well: the mid-cycle update has boosted performance by as much as an order of magnitude. 

Network Generation	Typical Speeds (Down)	Deployment Date
3G	384 kbps - 7.2 Mbps	2001-2010
3.5G	7.2 Mbps - 21 Mbps	2008-2012
4G	10 Mbps - 100 Mbps	2010-present
4G-Advanced	100 Mbps - 1 Gbps	2014-present
5G	1 Gbps - 10 Gbps	2019-present
5.5G	10 Gbps - 100 Gbps	2025-2030 (proposed)

None of that is going to impress many observers, any more than faster home broadband speeds tend to be associated with specific new use cases or applications. Faster is better, in part to support multi-device and multi-household accounts; to account for congestion during the day or week; and even, for some, as a way of compensating for performance hits imposed by use of virtual private networks. 

The actual improvement in single device, single user experience might not be so great, except as an insurance policy to maintain adequate throughput or latency performance at peak load periods. 

So, yes, we are likely in a situation where raw increases in expected speeds, or lower latency performance, is desirable for all sorts of reasons beyond the minimum performance levels to support a single user, on a single device, using a single app. 

As was the case in earlier years, faster speeds are essentially forms of overprovisioning, as customers once purchased usage buckets larger than they expected to require, simply to avoid surprise overage charges. 

In the same way, faster access plans are a way to overprovision capacity so performance by any single user, on any single device, running any particular app, is protected from congestion during peak hours of network usage.