Such bands could help to deliver multi-gigabit mobile broadband speeds, but achieving good coverage is a costly obstacle.
Ofcom has already auctioned off and released various 5G friendly mobile bands between 700MHz and 3.8GHz (example) to EE (BT), O2 (VMO2), Vodafone and Three UK, which reflects the same sort of bands that mobile operators have been harnessing since the advent of the first 3G and 4G mobile data networks some years ago.
Naturally, the more spectrum frequency that a mobile operator can access, the more data it can push to customers for faster speeds. The higher frequencies (e.g. 26GHz) are thus attractive because they provide lots of extra spectrum frequency for data to be sent and received at extremely fast speeds (e.g. multi-Gigabit performance is much easier), but the catch is that such signals are easily disrupted (weak) and don’t travel very far.
Put another way, any mobile operator that wants to build a 5G (or even future 6G) network using the mmWave bands would need to create an extremely dense (and thus expensive) network in order to ensure wide coverage. In practice, this tends to restrict the usefulness of such bands to serving densely populated areas (e.g. city shopping malls, airports, events etc.) or to support fixed wireless access (FWA) style broadband links to specific homes and businesses. Some parts of the proposed bands also have existing users.
