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Dear Editor:
I’d like to comment on your guest column about 5G that was recently published: https://county10.com/jeff-hammer-transitioning-to-5g
The primary benefits of 5G technology are (1) faster and (2) more capacity. Like adding lanes to a highway while also increasing the speed limit.
But the question in your article was: “Why are they abandoning older technologies that work just fine for me?”
Quite simply put, it costs money to provide and support old technologies along with the new.
Consider automobiles. What would it be like if you had kept every single vehicle you’ve ever owned. And kept them all in running condition with regular maintenance. And continued driving every one of them, so that there was normal wear and tear on all of them? It would be fun, of course, but would certainly get expensive. Think of the garage space you’d need! And I don’t even want to consider how much it would cost to change out the tires on all of them. You might even have to hire different mechanics for the various vehicles, depending on their training and experience.
This is exactly why technology companies abandon old technologies when adopting new ones. It simply wouldn’t be profitable. They’d go out of business.
Perhaps you already knew this and just wanted to channel Andy Rooney for the column, but it seems like you honestly didn’t know. Hope this helps!
— Chad Cloman
p.s., 10 Gbps stands for 10 gigabits per second which is very roughly about 1 gigabyte per second. It’s a marketing ploy where they can present a larger number and hope people don’t notice the units. Plus the majority of people don’t know the subtle difference between the abbreviations for gigabits (Gb) and gigabytes (GB). Finally, to make it even more deceptive, that number is the maximum theoretical speed, with actual speeds often being significantly lower.