aka @JWBananas@startrek.website aka @JWBananas@lemmy.world aka @JWBananas@kbin.social
Do you know what the signal bar on a phone actually represents?
Thoughts and prayers. It will even lie about the technology in use (e.g. it may display “5G” while connected to a “4G LTE” cell if that cell supports 5G EN-DC, regardless of if the feature is actually in use).
My friend, most base stations got fiber backhaul before 5G even existed. We are well beyond that problem.
In fact, it is not uncommon in 2025 to have fiber fronthaul from the remote radio (at the mast) back to the “cloud” where the actual base station is virtualized and/or software-defined (at the data center).
The usable signal issue is a whole other complex can of electromagnetic worms and in contemporary times is a side effect of how 5G NR is sort of “bolted on” to 4G LTE. It is not dissimilar to the growing pains that mixed 3G/4G networks had.
Normies don’t tend to perform OS installs from slipstreamed update media.