[daemonhunter]

Locally 3g was the most reliable. I think we're working backwards in accessibility of the network. It seemed just a few years ago, all we needed was a tower every so often, now we have towers and microcells. Is it a capacity issue or have we pushed into a spectrum that is more suited to dense cities rather than less dense towns?

[roxgib]

I think capacity is a big part of it? People consuming a lot more video at higher resolutions so while 3G might have been fine for the time we needed to upgrade to squeeze more bandwidth into the available spectrum. It wouldn't be so bad if phones were better and switching to the best available signal, they they could use the efficient 5G connection when it's available, but fall back to 4G when the 5G is blocked by a building or something (which I gather is more common due to the high frequencies used)

[IntelMiner]

I remember in the 3G era needing an Optus "HomeZone" at our house in Australia. Only 30 minutes drive from the dead center of a capital city, but our "country town" had a single cell tower and we were on the edge of town. So we'd get a single bar indoors and 2 bars outdoors