Mohanbir Sawhney is a professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

Wireless service providers continue to battle over 5G dominance in the United States. The fifth-generation wireless technology promises to bring far higher speeds and innovative new uses for consumers and businesses, from transportation to medical technology.

Although a handful of announcements about 5G availability in recent weeks might make consumers believe that the 5G revolution is here, it will take at least a couple more years — likely 2025 — before we're all using the new technology.

T-Mobile , for example, recently announced the launch of its nationwide 5G network. But there are limitations: It's a low-band network, which means it will offer speeds about twice as fast as 4G, but not the 10 times speed improvement that consumers expect from a 5G network. Meanwhile, AT&T (CNN's parent company) and Verizon have announced faster 5G networks that operate at higher frequencies, but their coverage is limited to only select areas. The bottom line: 5G will be a gradual evolution — not a revolution.

Even if consumers are lucky enough to be in a city or neighborhood where they can get superfast 5G coverage, they would need to buy one of the few high-end smartphones that can take advantage of 5G networks, such as the $1,300 Samsung Galaxy S10 5G phone. And Apple is not expected to launch a 5G-capable iPhone until late 2020. Add to this the fact that most Americans only upgrade their phones every three or four years, leaving a good portion of the US population without a device to access a 5G network for quite awhile.

But in the long term, 5G's potential is enormous and may in fact be underhyped. As higher-frequency 5G networks become widely deployed and more 5G-capable devices and infrastructure become available, 5G will evolve into a truly revolutionary technology. It will offer much higher data speeds and lower latency, which means users will experience less delay when downloading a file or watching a video, and self-driving cars will be able to process all the information they need to make life-or-death decisions in the blink of an eye.

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