5G is starting to feel like a tease, a blurry mirage, something beyond the horizon that will never come into complete view.

Few of the goals set out to be achieved by 5G have been realized. It’s been “early days” for 5G since late 2018, and while progress has been made it’s been incremental and slow.

Sure, there are dozens of 5G networks out in the world today, but none of them are truly 5G. Moreover, relatively few people have access to 5G, and those that do haven’t exactly set the world on fire by appealing to our collective fear of missing out.

5G was never going to be everything its proprietors claimed it would become, and the proof of that is beginning to surface. Adoption levels are relatively low as operators and vendors increasingly walk back sensational claims and temper expectations.

5G should be a relatively simple prospect — faster speeds, more ubiquitous connectivity, and services that can fuel more interactive and efficient applications. But that wasn’t enough for those who stand to profit from 5G. They’ve told us it’s going to change the world to the point we won’t be able to imagine life without it.

What can you do with 5G that I can’t do without it? Doom scroll faster? No thanks.

The 5G opportunity for enterprises is still unmet too, mired in the muck and mire of tests and conceptual thinking. Enterprise aspirations abound but only so far as more important and pressing challenges go ignored. The private enterprise network opportunity is real, but it’s narrow. Connectivity is a tissue that can fuse some business goals to better outcomes, but not all.

5G will no doubt gain more access to enterprises, unlock new opportunities for retailers, and deliver new ways for municipalities and health care providers to deliver services. Unfortunately, as is its wont, the industry isn’t being genuine about the scope of these changes or the speed at which they will occur.

The COVID-19 crisis hangs over all of this, and all of us, with its unrelenting despair, endless waves of uncertainty, and frequent whiffs of impending doom. What does post-pandemic society look like and how will all of us evolve to carry on amid this ominous threat? We have no sense of when this will end.

Prospects in the U.S., which is suffering an outbreak worse than any other country in the world, are grim. Death rates are surging and single-day rises in COVID-19 cases are breaking records every few days.

A mass return of workers to sprawling corporate campuses seems unlikely. Every data point indicates that things will continue to get worse until we make drastic behavioral changes or a viable vaccine is developed and administered at a scale that will require astronomical, and heretofore unseen, levels of cooperation between governments, public health agencies, businesses, and the public at large.

5G isn’t going to change any of that, and it isn’t designed to, but it’s time for all the hype and hoopla of 5G to come crashing back down to earth.

Meanwhile, the puzzle pieces of 5G are still being formed behind the scenes. Release 16, the second slate of standards defined by 3GPP, was just released earlier this month. More technologies are set to be  added to the final and formally adopted version of Release 17 sometime next year. That might happen, but don’t count on it.

More telling perhaps is the remarkable lack of interest I received when I reached out to a handful of CIOs and IT advisors to gain their perspective on the latest technologies included in 5G standards. They’re understandably waiting to see what 5G operators actually deliver. Anything else would be untethered from reality.

Technology changes slowly, especially when it involves global infrastructure, requires widespread adoption, and the resources of hundreds of vendors and their respective diverse supply chains. Incremental progress may not inspire many of us, but that doesn't mean it should be dismissed entirely. We should, however, be skeptical of otherworldly claims. 

Mobile networks are generally upgraded every 10 years, and none of them have fulfilled lofty expectations set at the outset. 5G will be no different. Tens of billions of dollars have already been invested in 5G, and there’s little to show for it.

5G will eventually, to varying degrees, contribute to autonomous vehicles, remote surgery, and vast realms built upon virtual reality, but those are largely distractions. The notion of smart cities is a meaningful ideal, but who’s going to pay for it and how much time will that take?

Just as 5G presents new opportunities for IoT in retail, factories, and heavily industrialized businesses, it doesn’t single handedly overcome inherent challenges. All of this feeds on pie-in-the-sky thinking that requires us to suspend belief in almost everything else we know to be true.

Businesses have no idea what will unfold during the remainder of 2020. Economic activity is stagnant, municipalities are strapped for cash, auto and retail sales are in steep decline, schools remain closed, parents are struggling to balance work and care, and the scourge of unemployment and inequity looms larger than it has in a generation.

Wishful 5G thinking doesn’t even register at a time when most of us are just trying to survive and look forward to better days.