5g easily penetrates your walls. Your phone can do it at low power to communicate with the towers.
I'm thinking, as an engineer, you want the low resolution massive net of 5g to see everything going on and when you need higher resolution you dive into the 60 ghz devices at the location for finer grain resolution. That's probably what this buildout is for.
5g cant penetrate your walls. They have various modes of 5g. Extended range 5g lowers the frequency to 24ghz with a corresponding drop in bandwidth to gain better penetration and range out to about a mile or two. 60ghz 5g high speed which is what they are talking about here has max range of about 1000 feet and has a requirement of direct line of sight with the receiver. 24ghz has been fairly standard for point to point wifi for a while. At one point i worked for a local government and they had two high power >100w 24ghz point to point wifi towers around 300' tall that were about 15-20 miles apart to link to remote infrastructure this was in 2009.
5g does penetrate walls.
https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=929131
The penetration loss through multiple layers was observed to be as high as 47.6 dB for I2I scenario, yet not as high as the 66.5 dB observed for the O2I scenario. In summary, we conclude that signals transmitted at 60 GHz both inside buildings and into buildings will suffer from severe penetration losses due to ambient building materials, heavily reducing coverage with respect to line-of-sight conditions. On the other hand, the high penetration loss of building materials can be a potential advantage to reduce interference from neighboring wireless network systems.
47db loss is basically unusable especially with low power devices like a phone or wifi aps which are limited to around 32db of signal strength. You aren't getting fullband 5g inside your house they are reducing frequency to 24ghz extended range 5g in those conditions regardless of what your phone displays.
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