re: Assuming 5g really is the future, how to buy in now?

Yeah, this should be confused with your ISP. They follow a different set of rules. 5G is strictly termed for wireless communications.

Some of the cool things we've done so far in the lab pre-5G are mostly with LAA and massive MIMO.

Think of large city centers with great tower coverage but still have holes in the map per say. What we have done as well as Erricson for that matter, is combined the use of small cells to fill these holes. One in particular, the LAA small cell unit, uses unlicensed spectrum for CA (carrier aggregation). Most up to date phones have at least 4TX 4RX antennas. With that in mind, if the network is overloaded in your area per se, your phone could use LAA to not see a significant drop in the downlink. It wouldn't be as good as pure 3CC from LTE BTS, because it does require a reservation, but it allows more people to consume network resources at the same time and not be slowed down to oblivion.

I am very excited about 5G, maybe not at the 600Mhz level, but at the mmWave level, because that's the real technology when normal people think "5G."

It's a challenge though. We park a truck in front of NAM HQ to transmit and test for what seems like over 2 years now