After years of hype, 5G took a back seat at CES 2023, as the industry focuses on laying the groundwork for self-driving cars, AR, and IoT in smart cities
Context & Ripple Effects
CES has cycled through connectivity-and-device hype before — the 2017 and 2018 editions were already promising self-driving car tech, VR, and drones (the 2017 preview) — and the smart-home corner of the show hit a wall after overbuilding ahead of consumer demand (CES 2021's smart-home pause). CES 2023 marks the same maturation for 5G: after years as the show's headline network story, it receded into background plumbing while exhibitors pitched what runs on top of it — autonomous vehicles, AR, and city-scale IoT.
The retreat tracks the money. Carriers spent heavily racing to deploy 5G and are now carrying debt with little revenue to show for it (carriers backed into a corner by their 5G rollout), so the industry narrative has flipped from selling faster speeds to justifying the network through industrial and automotive use cases.
First-order effects
- Mobile operators lose the marketing tailwind of 5G-as-feature at the industry's biggest showcase, forcing them to defend capex with enterprise and automotive returns instead of consumer upgrades.
- Vendors and automakers at CES 2023 reposition around applications — self-driving groundwork, AR, and IoT deployments — making 5G an assumed layer rather than a product pitch.
Second-order effects
- With consumer 5G monetization stalled, operators and equipment makers pivot the roadmap toward 5.5G capabilities aimed at autonomous cars, drones, and industrial IoT (experts see 5.5G serving autonomous cars and drones more than everyday users) — a business-to-business framing that shifts who pays for network upgrades.
- Smart-city IoT projects become the reference customers for next-gen connectivity, pulling network investment decisions away from handset launch cycles and toward municipal and industrial procurement.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, cellular generations stop being consumer events and become infrastructure cycles judged on vertical adoption — repeating the arc the smart-home segment already traced from CES hype to demand-driven consolidation.
- Carrier balance sheets strained by the 5G buildout could shape how aggressively networks are upgraded for 6G-era workloads, giving autonomous-vehicle and IoT industries a stake in operator consolidation and pricing.
The trend: Connectivity technology is shifting from headline consumer feature at trade shows to invisible infrastructure whose value is set by industrial adopters like automakers and smart-city IoT deployments.