There are serious problems with the rollout of 5G. It interferes with plane navigation and may lead to inaccurate weather forecasts. Major airports are grounding planes as a result of the former, and meteorologists are rightfully concerned about the latter.

But the thing I don’t understand about 5G is… who is it for? LTE has always been fast enough for anything I’ve wanted. I’ve never had issues streaming YouTube or Netflix. I’ve never had to wait for maps to load. The only thing I’ve ever really had to wait for are large downloads–but why I want to download large files over an expensive metered connection? Particularly onto a device with relatively meager storage capacity?

After doing a bit of reading, the only real benefits I see are improvements in congestion and latency. Congestion, great. I’ve experienced being at crowded venues with full bars and no data. As for latency, I literally couldn’t care less. It only matters for the online video-gamings the children play, right? (Get off my lawn)

Maybe I’m going to sound like the “everything that can be invented, has been invented” guy, (which is apocryphal, btw) but I don’t get it. The benefits of 5G don’t seem to outweigh its downsides. All I see is a means for mobile carriers and phone manufacturers to sell expensive services and products.

That said, new technologies find unexpected uses and mature in unanticipated ways. Visions of the future from years ago showed people speaking via videophones and voice-only calls were nonexistent. Instead, we’ve gone completely in the other direction. We text but never actually speak to each other. I have close friends that I haven’t spoken to in months or years, but we’re in contact via other means all the time.

Some time in the early 2000s, a friend showed me his expensive new phone. The stupid thing had a camera in it. A camera! In a phone! I literally laughed at him when he showed me the flash. Why would anyone want to take low-resolution, garbage photos with a phone? What an idiotic gimmick. What a waste of money. Despite being comically wrong today, my opinion made sense at the time. No one was predicting the smartphone revolution, or that high-quality phone cameras would all but wipe out the low-end digital camera market.

So I fully expect to be eventually proven wrong about 5G. It would be arrogant and short-sighted to assume anything else.

But for the moment… it’s stupid.