Yes, 5G is happening, although the operators are in various buildout stages. According to their map, ATT have almost all of greater L.A. covered, for instance, whereas Verizon have only a couple of areas.
Agree wrt to the upload speed – a bit surprised myself, as this is usually faster, albeit not by much (around 10Mbps).
Is 5G happening in the US? 200mbps down is damn good (and frankly I am amazed you get that over wifi) but 7mbps up is poor (for the 200mbps down speed). In Europe you won’t get 200mbps down over any cellular connection AFAIK but 7mbps up is probably achieved all the time on 4G.
Reading this thread I decided to run a speed test at my line and the results are
down: 197.1 Mbps
up: 7.3 Mbps
Setup is fiber (I think ) on the street, then cable (TV) into the complex, then WiFi to my computer.
Peter wrote:
I would argue copper, say 10-20mbps, is good enough for the vast majority of people, so “fibre everywhere” is largely a symbolic national-politic chest-beating thing
To get copper at 10-20Mbps you have to be very close to the exchange (i.e. living in an area where fibre will be rolled out anyway). Many rural or semi-rural areas just won’t get that speed out of copper – generally you have to be a mile or less from the exchange to get those speeds. Also if you’ve got 10-20Mbps on copper that’s just your downstream – your upstream might be less than 1 meg. As the COVID situation has shown, good internet = good economic resilience for a fair portion of the economy, and upstream is important too.
Higher speed copper also causes a lot of radio frequency interference (VDSL2 is particularly bad for RFI)
gallois wrote:
if we ever get 1MB download speed or more than 0.5MB for more than a minute for upload we break out the champagne
This is a perfect expression.
I know this feeling oh so well…
At the moment I pay Orange for 8Mb, if we ever get 1MB download speed or more than 0.5MB for more than a minute for upload we break out the champagne.We are usually getting less than 50kb/s .The last few months I have been trying to upload a video 2GB. Even to go to Google Drive which starts up from the place you get to, it has taken 2days. I tried another way of sending the file which had no memory so needed to start again if I got cut off.This is why I don’t write up photographic or video trip reports.
The network engineers laughed when I asked if we would be getting fibre optic soon as the politicians has been promising.
I was hoping that 5G might be the answer but reading this thread it looks like I am going to be disappointed.
Well, yes, but ADSL is a different debate.
I would argue copper, say 10-20mbps, is good enough for the vast majority of people, so “fibre everywhere” is largely a symbolic national-politic chest-beating thing. The typical movie channel bw is well under 10mbps; you would need to be watching subscription 4K p0rn to need more 
I would also argue, from my own experience of service levels on voice over copper versus ADSL over copper, that any dumping of analog phone lines (or ISDN) should not be done until FTTP (fibre to the premises) can be delivered to all relevant customers.
ADSL is perhaps not relevant to 5G, but, in big cities, an awful lot of people, living a “modern life”, have no landline and therefore have no ADSL, and live entirely on their phone, and that is probably where a lot of bandwidth is going, because 100GB/month is quite a common load on ADSL now.
Perhaps another thing driving the need for more cellular bw is the abandonment of wifi usage in cafes, where getting of the password from an illiterate checkout worker has often been a hassle.
gallois wrote:
…the same rings true for fibre optic cables. The towns and cities get it but if you live in the rural areas forget it.
That’s mainly a political question. Right now about 50% of households in rural areas of Sweden has fiber access and the figure is increasing rapidly. Considering that by European measures Sweden is a sparsely populated country, it should not be difficult for countries such as France or the UK to achieve the same or better figures, if there is a will.
