alt Hacker News> New towers aren't backwards compatible, and the bandwidth has been largely reduced.
Yup.
In tech-speak there is 5G NSA (Non-Standalone Architecture) and 5G SA (Standalone Architecture).
5G NSA is a kludge, it is 5G radios operating on a legacy 4G core. Inherently backwards compatible.
5G SA is 5G radios on 5G core. Clearly not backwards compatible.
5G SA is the preferred route for good reason:
1. It delivers reduced power consumption at both operator and user-device level
2. It delivers improved latency and bandwidth at both operator and user-device levelReplies
In other words - noone in real life is deploying 5G only infrastructure right now and won't for awhile.
MSR base stations are the norm in the industry, not a rarity.
And it also planned-obsoletes 4G only devices, a big win for the operators that can then sell new 5G capable ones. Such a racket I swear. Can't wait to go through this shit again for 6G in about 5 years, like we did for 3G.
NSA can be rolled out with almost nothing more than a firmware update. For any existing carrier network, it was the obvious place to start 5G rollout.
If you're building new towers, things change, obviously. That said, a lot of industrial/IoT hardware still requires 4G so it's not entirely unreasonable to deploy 4G in new coverage areas.