Analysis 5G is a technical and economical miracle that you cannot help but admire. Soon our streets will be drenched in high-speed connectivity as all kinds of far-out radio boffinry get commercialised, productised, and deployed for something useful. Many billions of pounds of other people's money will be spent here. But the mobile networks are haunted by an awkward economic reality: for all the 5G razzle-dazzle, most punters just won't pay more for it.

Whether you're paying a tenner or 30 quid for that mobile contract today, that's pretty much what you'll be paying for 5G tomorrow, unless you're a

As the chip supplier to almost half the phone market , Qualcomm should be able to make a decent guess about when 5G will condense from vapourware into something more solid.

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Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm's president, predicted last week that 5G will be in mid-range handsets in 2020. That's a faster ramp into the mass market than 4G had.

The first real LTE phone to be approved by the FCC was in 2010, (not counting the 4G branding shenanigans by Sprint), but it was not until 2013 - the brief heyday of the Lumia range - until it reached

Analysis ISPs should be paid to provide slower internet speeds to poor people.

That's the extraordinary upshot of a meeting between an ISP industry group and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US.

In a letter [PDF] recording a meeting between the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association (WISPA) and the legal advisors to two FCC commissioners, the industry group "emphasized that the Commission’s goals would be better served by directing support to areas that lack any service at all and those that have access only below 10/1 Mbps."

The current definition of broadband is 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up.

If ever there was doubt that 2018 is the year of fear, it was confirmed by a panel discussion involving the two men that are credited with inventing the internet and the world wide web.

Inventor of the internet protocols TCP/IP Vint Cerf and inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee have spent the past 20 years talking in pragmatic but highly optimistic tones about the global networks they helped give birth to.

Today, at the Our People-Centered Digital Future conference in San Jose, the tone was very different. "It's a time of worry, a time of fear," Berners-Lee told attendees