The figures quoted during the rollout of the current network generation were genuine laboratory and demonstration results. Most users have never seen anything close to them, and the gap is explained by physics and economics rather than by dishonesty.
The spectrum question explains most of it
The single most important thing to understand, and it is rarely explained clearly.
Radio spectrum is divided into bands, and the properties of a band determine what a network built on it can do.
Low frequency bands travel a long way, penetrate buildings well, and carry relatively little data. Coverage is excellent and speeds are modest.
High frequency bands carry enormous amounts of data over very short distances and are blocked by almost anything, including walls, foliage and rain.
Mid bands sit between the two and are where most of the practical capacity has come from.
The headline speeds came from the high bands. The coverage most people have came from the low and mid bands. Both are the same network generation, and the experience differs by an order of magnitude.
Why high band deployment stalled
Economics, straightforwardly.
The range is so short that meaningful coverage requires an extremely dense deployment of small cells — on street furniture, on buildings, at intervals of a few hundred metres.
Each site needs power, a backhaul connection, planning permission and a site agreement.
The cost per unit of coverage is enormous, which is why deployment has concentrated in dense urban areas, stadiums, airports and specific venues where the traffic justifies it.
For a suburban street, the arithmetic does not work and probably never will.
What determines your actual speed
Beyond which band you are connected to.
How many people are sharing the same cell. Radio capacity is shared, so a busy cell delivers less to each user, which is why speeds fall at peak times and in crowds.
Distance from the tower and what is between you and it.
The backhaul connection behind the tower, which is a fixed line and can be the limiting factor regardless of radio capacity.
Your device's capabilities, since not all devices support all bands or all carrier aggregation combinations.
And network configuration, including whether the deployment is standalone or running on older core infrastructure, which affects latency in particular.
The latency claim, which was the more interesting one
The promise that received less coverage and matters more for the applications people described.
Very low latency was central to the case for remote surgery, autonomous vehicles and industrial control.
Achieving it requires more than radio. It requires processing close to the user rather than in a distant data centre, which means edge computing infrastructure that has been deployed far more slowly than the radio network.
Which is why the applications that justified the investment have largely not materialised in consumer contexts, and why the visible benefit for most people has been somewhat faster downloads.
Where it has genuinely delivered
To be fair, since the above reads as disappointment.
Capacity, substantially. Networks handle far more simultaneous users than before, which is why crowded places work better than they used to.
Fixed wireless access, providing broadband to homes where fixed lines are poor or absent, which is a genuine and underappreciated success in several markets.
Private networks for industrial sites, which is where the low latency and reliability claims have actually been realised, away from consumer attention.
And a considerably better experience in dense urban areas with mid-band deployment, which is real and is not what was advertised.
What to check about your own situation
Which band your device reports connecting to, which many phones will show in diagnostic screens and which explains your experience immediately.
Coverage maps from the operator, treated sceptically, and independent crowd-sourced coverage data, which is generally more honest.
Whether your device supports the bands your operator actually uses in your area, which is a real issue for devices bought in other markets.
And whether the network is standalone in your area, which affects latency more than speed.
The general lesson
Every network generation has been marketed on its best case and experienced as its average case.
The pattern will repeat with the next one, and the useful response is to ask which band, what density, and what the backhaul is, rather than to read the headline figure.
Battery and coverage trade-offs
A practical consequence users notice without knowing the cause.
Devices at the edge of coverage transmit at higher power to maintain a connection, which consumes battery noticeably faster.
Switching between network generations repeatedly, which happens in areas with patchy higher-generation coverage, also costs battery.
Which is why forcing a device to a lower network generation sometimes improves battery life substantially in a weak-signal area, at some cost in speed.
Most devices allow this in the network settings and it is a reasonable thing to try if battery life is poor in a specific location.