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 expanding IoT in cities
When it wasn't being overshadowed by covid resurgences, CES, for the past few years, has partially functioned as a big 5G pep rally.
Context & Ripple Effects
The demotion of 5G at CES 2023 is the endpoint of a fade the show itself has been documenting: The Verge's CES 2020 roundups already noted that tech companies fetishized AI and 5G a little less than in prior years, and the 2021 show — held all-virtual with roughly 1,900 exhibitors, down from 4,500 in 2020 — coincided with a smart home industry pause after years of overpromising to consumers.
What replaces 5G on the floor is not new so much as finally staged: self-driving car tech was already on the CES 2018 docket alongside AR/VR and smart home, and 2023 is the year those categories absorb the connectivity story — 5G shifting from headlining product to assumed groundwork for autonomous vehicles, AR, and city-scale IoT.
First-order effects
- Exhibitors that once built CES booths around 5G as a consumer pitch now present it as plumbing underneath self-driving, AR, and smart-city demos, so carriers and chipmakers lose the headline slot they held at recent shows.
- The categories that take over the floor — autonomous vehicles, AR, urban IoT — get the marketing attention and buyer meetings that 5G demos previously captured.
Second-order effects
- With the consumer smart home already in a demonstrated pause, vendors leaning on connectivity hype are pushed toward enterprise and municipal buyers, where city-scale IoT offers a concrete customer for the infrastructure 5G was supposed to justify.
- Rivalry shifts from whose network is fastest to whose network enables the showcased applications, pressuring network operators to bundle 5G into automotive and smart-city partnerships rather than sell it standalone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, CES functions as a hype-cycle barometer: a technology's disappearance from the marquee signals its graduation into assumed infrastructure, as 5G now joins the ranks of technologies demonstrated years earlier that became groundwork rather than products.
- Consumer-facing connectivity marketing gives way to application-specific pitches, structurally reordering the show around verticals — automotive, AR, municipal IoT — rather than around network generations.
The trend: CES is tracking connectivity technologies through a predictable arc — headline hype, quiet demotion, absorption into application groundwork — with 5G in 2023 completing the transition AI and 8K began showing at CES 2020.