2021 saw some notable changes in the world of 5G. Here’s who leapt ahead…and who bit it hard.
2021 was a weird year for all of us. I feel like it’s lasted four or five years; I look back at stories I wrote in March, and they seem like an era ago. For the 5G world,2021 was a year of some hope and a lot of disappointment. New, real-life 5G applications are few and far between, and only one US carrier (T-Mobile) had the mid-band airwaves that turned out to be the right ones to base a nationwide network on.5G may very well lead to new things, but it’ll take longer than we hoped, possibly all the way to 2027. In a strange year, the playing field shifted. Some players took stronger positions, while others weakened. I’ve chosen four winners and four losers based on my coverage and testing this year. Like what you’re reading? You’ll love it delivered to your inbox weekly. Sign up for the Race to 5G newsletter Sign up for the Race to 5G newsletter. Winners T-Mobile won our 2021 drive tests to find the Fastest Mobile Network in the US. T-Mobile won its first-ever Fastest Mobile Network award for having the only nationwide 5G network that matters. The carrier’s purchase of Sprint brought it a wealth of midband airwaves—the stuff that’s standard for 5G in the rest of the world—and Neville Ray’s crack team has put those airwaves to work very quickly. Offering reasonably priced home broadband is the first major application, but there will be more.2022 will be a tougher challenge, though, as AT&T and Verizon start bringing their own mid-band networks online. Mediatek used to be the cut-rate chipset provider, best known in the US for powering low-end and no-name devices. This year it rebranded its lineup and grabbed space in the stunningly successful Samsung Galaxy A12 and Galaxy A32 5G phones, making it a genuine competitor against Qualcomm for 5G business in the US. Qualcomm has had the US Android market pretty much to itself for the past few years, but that ended in 2021.
