Thinking about whats next: how many kilowatts can your home electricity carry?

Firstly, great as always to have this insight from Vodafone about what is , and in particular acknowledgement of the miss that was 3G*

Firstly, acknowledging the two "successes" of 2G/4G:
- 2G: had two specific use cases for users, voice and text. And that is what it seemed was the primary purpose for 2G. [yes, data services existed but always felt like an aside and just a nice side benefit that some/any data]. Mobile Telecom operators did very well out of this world, which was largely just a recreation of the fixed line world using wireless technology.
- 4G: appears to have been designed with fast data in mind, a tacit acknowledgement that everything (including your phone calls) to data. So the focus was primarily on a good, fast, internet connection. Purely, solely focused on letting customers experience the Internet. This is evident that even voice wasn't initially supported on 4G and a situation we're still largely currently in where voice calls fall back to 3G.

Which brings me to the 'over hyped that didn't deliver' tech, 3G. Firstly, an aside: personally, I joined the Telecom world in the early 2000's (and Vodafone -the first time! - originally in mid 2000's). just as. 3G was announced in Ireland and all staff were given a free Nokia 6630. Speeds didn't seem much more impressive than 2G, and battery life was crippling if using data****
At the time, I was also spending 3G, from memory (although I'm more than happy to be told I'm wrong!), felt like it was focused on the technology, NOT the customer experience. And the focus on the technology was to show-horn three completely different formats together: giving equal priority to voice, data, and text. Even the data speeds were not particularly great. 

Of course, one interesting point is that even if 3G was not as expected, it'll still be the old 2G that will be switched off first. [Related: great to see a technology switched for the benefit of customers. When will MMS follow the same route?]

So, for 5G is are we focused on the engineering, or is it focused on the customer experience/product? 
What do customers (consumer or enterprises) want? A persistent, continuous internet connection no matter where they are. We're fast approaching the point where the data connection will be 'good enough' and the services on top will start to flourish (it's already started). Software Will continue to Eat The World, migrating more and more businesses to this world. so '5G' should focus on the cleanest possible access method for customers to get online with quick-response, seamless connection. This is also viable because the devices available to everyone are also now 'good enough' so as to enable a new layer of possibilities (3G was in many ways partially poor due to the standard of mobile devices at the time also).

Start with the customer experience and work back to the technology. Can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. What benefit can we give to the customer, and where can we take the customer. Not, starting with lets sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have, and then how are we going to market that.
Mistakes are being made, but that's good because it shows decisions are being made. Some people will be pissed off.

* The comment about 3G and its failure, reminds me of a recent talk I attended where Facebook stood up and quite happily chatted about how they completely missed mobile. Not that you'd be able to tell from their current success!

** COTI: Child Of The Internet. My age puts me outside the bracket of 'Millennials' but I was lucky enough to get continuous access to the Internet in 1995, just before the seminal Netscape 2.0 was released and the dawn of the now-ubiquitous Web. So, pretty much my whole life of telecommunications has involved over the Internet (for voice, data), not 'telephony'.

*** 1G network: analogue cellular. Your old phone line to your home that has existed for over 100 years, only delivered wirelessly.
2G: your phone call gets converted to digital signal allowing little glimpses of 'now' with basic data services. I treat 3G as part of this era also, even if it was a change from circuit-switched to packet-switched.
4G: IP-networking. You know the scene in the Matrix with all the icons flowing down the screen? Now your voice is just another set of icons flowing on the screen, another piece of data.

**** I fondly remember flattening the battery of that Nokia is under 2 hours one day when doing some tests/experiments of working exclusively from a mobile (it's easy to think 'old' phones lasted for multiple days but when all you used it for was sending texts and some phone calls, no wonder they did): anyone who thinks modern smartphones are bad.....