Cell phone makers and telecom companies are increasingly desperate to keep us in the habit of trashing our phones every year or two in order to be among the first to own the Next Big Thing. That made some sense when cell phones were progressing from flip phones that couldn’t do anything but make a phone call to the web browsers/movie screens/GPS navigators/music players/cameras that they are today.

But there hasn’t been a Next Big Thing for quite a while now, and it’s getting really easy to see them sweat. Recently we’ve been offered three — count ‘em, three — cameras on a single phone. No thanks. For $2,000 you could earlier this year have bought a double wide phone with a screen that folds out to IMAX size: “It’s huge! It folds! It breaks! After just a few folds!” No thanks.

But they have it now. They are sure they have it now, it’s called 5G. The explanation is a little technical, so hold tight: using a combination of ultra-high, ultra-low and ultra-middle radio frequencies, 5G networks will dramatically increase download and upload speeds and reduce latency. Yeah, I don’t know what that means either. Apparently, if you have been cursing your phone for taking more than four seconds to download a two hour, high-definition movie for display on your IMAX-size fold out screen, then 5G is what you want.

But the really Big New Thing, apparently, is that 5G will enable the Internet of Things to flourish. It will be just the thing for the increasing number of people who feel the urge, several times a day, to whip out their phones and talk to their toasters. It will be, the hucksters are saying without blushing, a new industrial revolution. Which is, we will all agree, a good thing, because the first one is about pooped out.

Downside? No, ma’am, not in any of the ads I’ve read. Oh, you mean in the real world? Well, a couple things.

To achieve coverage, 5G will require transmitters to be spaced every thousand feet or so . That’s one in every city block. Even at that, ultra-high-frequency waves will have a great deal of trouble penetrating things like walls. And rain, and hands. And sometimes, air.

5G phones need more hardware to do more things and thus are battery hogs . So your phone is either going to be a large clunker, or you are going to be tethered to a charger.

Hundreds of scientists and researchers in 40 countries believe that the saturation of high frequency RF required by 5G networks will be as harmful to human health as exposure to asbestos and arsenic . The industry says that guidelines are in place to protect the public. The guidelines are based on a study of how much a cell phone heated the head of a plastic mannequin. It was done in 1996.

Both the network and the phones that use them will be hideously expensive, therefore so will the service. By one estimate, installing enough transmitters to reach just half the American population would cost $400 billion .

The rollouts attempted so far have not gone well. Perhaps most successful was AT&T, which simply changed the label on its 4G network to 5GE, the E standing for “evolution” and meaning “maybe someday.” Verizon announced rollouts in multiple urban markets, by which they meant that you could get service in your house by having a 5G cell tower installed on your roof. Korea (yes, there is a global race to be “first” in 5G) brags that it has a quarter-million 5G users, but many of them are unhappy with poor coverage and performance speed.

The hype is working gloriously in attracting go-go bankers, hedge fund high rollers and stock-breaking gamblers, and in today’s business environment the fact that it’s not working for the customers is pretty much beside the point.

Some of us more grounded in reality have our eyes on a different Next Big Thing — technology with a low initial investment, although a steep learning curve. It’s called smoke signals. Talk about Next Generation.

“PHONE WALL” by Shiyang he is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0