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.
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Winners
T-Mobile
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
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.
Motorola
The death of LG Mobile (see below) led to a land rush to fill the midrange and prepaid slots it left behind. The most successful player was Motorola, whose midrange G-series phones fit exactly into the missing LG spaces at every major carrier. At one point this year Motorola was at 12% US market share according to Counterpoint, which is almost unheard of in our Apple-and-Samsung-dominated market.
Ericsson
Verizon spent tens of billions of dollars buying C-band 5G spectrum from the government, for a network that the company intends to build out very quickly in 2022. The big infrastructure winner here was Ericsson, bagging its biggest five-year contract ever to put up the new network. Samsung will also be involved; Nokia will not be. This is good news, in my view, as Nokia’s 5G network equipment in the US has had subpar performance since Sprint first started installing it in 2018.
Losers
AT&T “5G”
AT&T’s 5G performance is the worst of the three major carriers; as of midyear, it was still often worse than 4G-only mode, because AT&T was throwing away performance in favor of having a marketing icon in your status bar. AT&T has been the biggest offender in terms of overpromising and underdelivering on “nationwide” 5G (including the whole shenanigan with its confusing 5GE icon). Now that it’s no longer trying to be a movie studio, hopefully it can refocus on being a network provider.
Verizon’s Visible
Verizon’s “youth oriented” prepaid brand fizzled out this year, and my sources say there’s more bad news to come for Visible now that Verizon’s purchase of Tracfone is complete. Visible was always more proof that some provisioning and billing systems worked than it was an actual business plan, and I’ve been getting the feeling that Verizon is ready to move on.
LG
The longtime #3 player in the US smartphone market, LG just up and quit in 2021. While Americans saw (and bought) plenty of LG phones, they weren’t selling much outside of the US, being generally undercut by lower-cost Chinese brands that don’t sell here. The midrange hole LG left in the market has been taken up by Motorola, OnePlus, and TCL, but none of these companies have LG’s eccentric try-anything-once verve, like the swiveling LG Wing phone. It will be missed.
Google Stadia
Remember Google’s big drive into game streaming? Which was supposed to be a big 5G application? Which was a big part of 2020’s Pixel 5 launch? Anyone remember this? Anyone? No? I’ll let myself out.
Big, But Boring
Apple and Samsung
Apple and Samsung both made fine phones this year, but they didn’t do anything interesting in the world of 5G, and neither company really did anything with their mobile lines to change their fortunes overall.
Apple launched 2020’s iPhone 12 with 5G being a flagship feature, and then launched this year’s iPhone 13 with 5G being a bullet point.
Samsung redeemed itself after the miserable Galaxy S20 Ultra with the excellent Galaxy S21 Ultra, but that change was all about the camera. Where I saw video chat as a breakthrough 5G foldable feature in early 2020, Samsung doesn’t seem to have pushed things forward with 5G applications in 2021.
A lot of the lack of 5G moves here comes down to the wireless carriers not having much for Apple and Samsung to springboard off of. Hopefully, 2022’s C-band launches and T-Mobile’s mid-band expansion will give them something to work with.
That’s it for 2021. See you in 2022, as the Race to 5G continues!
