The carriers themselves have an impact on this beyond physical layer improvements.

A big one is data cost rates and caps.

I've heard more than once, "5G means I will zip right through my data and will cost me more."

LTE actually works great for me, and I do video calls and such over LTE fairly regularly. Now I do pay for that, and I'm compensated. That's what the carriers would love to see continue, but that also limits mass adoption too. Many people don't like extra charges appearing on their phone account. I don't, but I'm in a position to deal with them too. Annoyance.

Plenty of people really feel that extra $20, $50, more depending on what it is they did, like drive too close to Canada with automatic data roaming turned on. That can be painful.

Years ago, early 90's era, there was a magazine. Boardwatch, I believe it was. There were some great voices in that one, and all these topics we discuss today are nothing new, and most of us here know that.

There are some constants:

As mentioned, applications fill resources. Could be RAM, storage, throughput, bandwidth. Part of that is offering choice, the next one coming up.

*In broadcast / streaming, where there is a defined bitrate possible, choice will win out over quality. Here's a little thought experiment that suggests why that is generally the case:

Say you've got two streams or broadcast channels to use. One is boring, but exemplary quality, the other is poor quality, but compelling as it gets. Which one do you use? Which one do you believe most people will use?

That leads to, "Content is king."

One of the topics Boardwatch covered regularly was diversity in ISPs. As consolidation happened, another truism did as well, and that is basic economic trope at this point:

More choice = more competition = buyer gets highest value for the dollar.

Less choice = less competition = buyer gets lowest value for the dollar.

The fight to prevent lock-in is therefore eternal. Carriers of all types will seek to limit choice however they can.

Higher cost of change = lower choice.

This is also driving the one I mentioned above. Content being king means making more content options available almost always trumps quality.

I do have a small nit to pick:

To me, the word "bandwidth" isn't quite right. Yes, it speaks to the maximum information possible, but throughput is the more accurate word, in my view, when it comes to the impact moving more bits per second at lower latencies has on society overall. Another quick thought exercise:

Say you have a choice of a very fast connection, but latency is all over the place, and or there are random slowdowns vs. one that isn't as fast, but is super consistent. Which do you use? Which one do you believe other people will use? I prefer the latter most of the time given the constancy metrics match up with my use cases.

My point here is the carriers have a huge impact today! We've consolidated down to a point where many truisms about the Internet are not so true in the wireless realm. Back in the 90's, when most of us were on wires most of the time, all that discussion about carriers, ISPs (when they were two different things often enough to make that distinction), and the up and coming "cloud" computing being equated to how things were in the late 60's and 70's, has played out fairly accurately.

Kudos to the people with vision back then. Too bad it didn't have a bigger impact on public policy overall.