Growing up in the 90s with 14.4 baud dialup, and having 450mbps service today, my internet experience is as close to "Seamless" as I ever would have projected 25 years ago. Most service issues I run into are with the services I consume, not the connection from me... E.g., Xbox Live going down or JackBox Party Pack freezing on a busy Friday night.
Will it ever be 100% connectivity, high speed, no interruptions, ever? No, 100% uptime is not possible. Even 99.9% uptime still means you're disconnected for 3.5 days a year, which is enough for many people to call and demand a rebate from the cable company. Still, even with really high deliverability rates... 99.999%, etc., there will still be times when something goes down. I think back on 9/11/2001, when from like 1995 to 9/10/2001, nobody had ever experience cell tower outages, maybe you'd lose service inside a building or something, or maybe leaving a sports event you couldn't call home because 75,000 fans just tried to make the same phone call from the same tower, but generally your cell service was never "down" because of volume aside from events like that, and once you were 10mi away from the stadium your call would go through. ...Then, on 9/11 till about 9/15, most people couldn't make any phone calls on their cell phones in or out of NYC and surrounding areas for a week.
I think we're always going to see situations like that. Amidst this coronavirus outbreak, in an area that's been on fuctional lockdown for about 3 weeks now, I think what's most surprising to me isn't that services have gone down, but that I really haven't experienced any major outages. My internet has been stable, Netflix, Disney+, Xbox, Amazon, etc, have all been steady. MS Teams, Hangouts, Duo, Zoom, etc., have all worked really well. My works' VPN has been good. Even smaller companies like Udemy are running solid. Shit I kinda all thought would go to shit if we suddenly all started using it at once, has surprisingly scaled really well.
If the internet ever had a true stress test, this is it. And while there have been articles and stories in some places of Netflix going to Standard Definition or YouTube only serving 720p so that emergency services get bandwidth priority, that's... really not a major compromise, and that's a success story. If I have to watch reruns of the Office, a 15 year old TV show, in 480p or 720p so that the hospitals in my city get priority access to life saving information, that's a compromise I'm willing to make. During WWII there were fucking breadlines, gas shortages, and widespread rationining. Today, my Mixer feed might be 10 seconds behind where I'd like it to be. Over the span of 3 weeks 75% of America, probably the largest consumer of bandwidth in the world (right?) switched to remote work, and everybody's lives shifted inside. That's not a slow transition of 5% a year over 15 years or something, it went from 5% fo 75% in a matter of days and weeks... and so far... the infrastructure has held up better than I would have ever imagined it would have a month ago.
But, outside of crisis, the low latency of 5G is probably going to be felt more on connected devices than it will be on your own phone, game console, computer, etc. On the individual consumer side we'll see that affect on the devices that come out because of how 5G enables that communication performance, but probably less so on ... say ... remotely streaming Halo 5 from XCloud to our phone (which will certainly benefit, but might not be *that* different than how we can experience it today with good traditional wifi + network; it'll be an incremental improvement there, faster response time, better stream quality, higher quality visual experience, etc, larger connection sessions, etc). The promise of 5G is going to be hundreds of new devices that can change your life in ways that you can't really imagine now. Sort of like how Wifi enabled the iPad to exist as it is today, but if you tried to imagine an iPAd even ~10 years earlier, in say 1998 ... when most internet users still dialed in through their phone line and only connected to the internet for 30minutes a day, and had to tie up a phone line to do it and could only do it from a hulking beast of a computer tether to their desk with a 11" enormous CRT monitor ..... It's tough to imagine the devices that can be enabled with ultra low latency 5G communication between connected devices. Imagine in 1996 saying to someone, "Can you turn on the lights? it's the Hue app on the ipad." The idea would be anathema, it's not science fiction or a marvel or something (you're *just* turning on lights," but the idea of using a ... super powerful mobile computer that's just a giant screen connected wirelessly to a home internet that is always on to do something so trivially mundane as to turn on or off all of the lights in your house, is a concept that would seem either pointless or impossible. Back in the 90s, the "future" of computing would be things like seamless video calls, like when technology gets better we're all going to be making video calls with grandma all day. And while that's the case right now in lockdown, for th emost part, most people communicate on short wave text messages, not long video calls. You're walking around with a super computer with the worlds most amazing digital camera, the size of a deck of cards in your pocket, and what you use it for most is to send 3-word messages to your friends. The way that technology changes your behavior is difficult to predict.
