He added that it takes about three to five years to fully roll out a new mobile generation.
It's been 5 years already. I'm sitting in my office right now at 36mbps and 200ms latency on 5g+. Meanwhile, if you go a mile north of me, you drop down to 4g and doing anything on the internet becomes impossible.
I'm pretty sure AT&T just changed the numbers from 4g to 5g and called it a day.
There's control plane sms data plane. You can upgrade the control plane without the data plane. That's what every carrier did. You had to before you could get the data plane improvements. Those improvements turned out to be expensive, so they didn't happen in most areas.