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Is there something fundamentally different about 5G that they can't deploy on all the existing towers?

Yes, there is. The higher frequency (15GHz!!) affords higher bandwidth, but requires many more towers because of the shorter range:

As far as frequency, the 5G test network used a 15 GHz frequency band, which is higher and shorter range than current 3G/4G cellular frequencies that top out at around 2.6 GHz, i.e. 2600 MHz LTE Band 7. The choice of short-range would make deployments of this technology suitable for densely populated urban areas, where many base stations could be deployed to offer super-fast speeds over a small area.

I'd also wager, that tracking your device's location will also become more precise...

AT&T, Verizon and Comcast do have billions in profits each year, which they could spend on advertising. Time Warner Cable only has about $500 million per year in profit, but their cable is already saturated with their advertising. Google has done relatively little advertising, mostly using resources like their Fiberspace, Mobile Fiberspace and retail stores. (source: I live 1/4 mile outside Google's service area) They have enough people talking about the service without buying advertising. Seems like I can't see anything online about Google Fiber without reading a pile of comments begging Google "Please come to ...".

I don't know about Google's other deals, but in Kansas City, they pay the same price for utility pole use as the competition (sadly, not all of the fiber will be buried). I suspect it's the same for all of their deals, since all the competition got their pole usage expenses lowered retroactively after Google negotiated prices down. Google also maintains a larger network than Level 3 (Level 3 Communications...), and builds their own network equipment (including what they sell/give Fiber customers). One of Google's strengths has been their continued ability to find ways to operate for less money than the competition. What costs are you educating them on again?

As for cherry picking customers, they just install in the most eager places first, which makes sense when you keep a 2-3 year backlog of installs to do, just in the KC metro area, and you have plenty of suburbs that you haven't even talked to yet, with penetration rates typically around 50%. Time Warner Cable also picks what areas they will and won't service. I have a neighbor who can't get their cable in their area (which somehow consists of just their house), despite being completely surrounded by Time Warner Customers.

ISP's have been hounding Google to pay for bandwidth at least as far back as when they bought YouTube, and even some countries (e.g. France) are trying to put pressure on them. Their policy has always been to fight difficult and expensive battles to set a favorable precedent. So far, only one company (Orange) has been successful at making Google pay for peering. In 2010 there was a study showing Google's network was the 2nd largest, only out sized by Level 3, and I think I read in a financial report that Google's network is now larger than Level 3's (article here). Google's private network to connect all their data centers operates at near 100% capacity all of the time (via OpenFlow), which was upgraded when it was considered really good to only waste 60-70% of the bandwidth. Google even builds their own network equipment because no one makes anything that will meet their needs. People were acting like Google was new to this networking game when they started to roll out Google Fiber. In reality, Google has a huge network that they manage and on the order of $10 billion in profit every year that will just rot (thanks to the Federal Reserve's inflation policies), unless Google finds ways to reinvest it. It's 3x the profit (and growing) of AT&T and Time Warner Cable combined, which are the two ISP's in my part of Kansas City.

I would guess it costs Google $300 per customer to run fiber, since that's what they charge for installation (waived with 1/yr Gigabit service), but that may not include everything Google pays for. I know they're paying $5 each for utility pole access and charge customers $100 for a replacement fiber jack and $200 for a replacement network box, which I assume includes some overhead in the price. They also do bulk installs by neighborhood instead of going all over to individual houses.

I expect they will roll out service to all 34 of the new cities in 9 metro areas ASAP, as long as the cities cooperative enough. Overland Park, a suburb of KC, had their offer revoked for asking questions. Their council was supposed to be approving the offer at a meeting, but instead decided to wait for clarification of one of the terms of the contract. I guess Google is too busy with people that are begging for service and offering their first born child for them to deal with questions at this point. They have a backlog through 2015 in the Kansas City area (city limits should be complete this year), and they still haven't announced anything for where I live, which is a painful 1/4 mile outside of a service area and less than 4 miles in any direction from Google Fiber. I'm stuck working from home with Time Warner, who also runs the connection at my data center 3 miles away, and requires me to tunnel my ssh session inside another TCP stream to avoid massive packet loss thanks to "upgrades". I never expected to lament losing the speed and reliability of dial up.

IEEE Comsoc have a series of so far five articles on history of packet switching, including An Early History of the Internet by Len Kleinrock which starts with:
"It is impossible to place the origins of the Internet in a single moment of time."

The others are of the Internet and related technologies from different perspectives:
UK by Peter Kirstein
Canada Datapac
France Transpac
US Telenet currently paywalled but will probably soon be available at
http://www.comsoc.org/commag/history-communications

IEEE Comsoc have a series of so far five articles on history of packet switching, including An Early History of the Internet by Len Kleinrock which starts with:
"It is impossible to place the origins of the Internet in a single moment of time."

The others are of the Internet and related technologies from different perspectives:
UK by Peter Kirstein
Canada Datapac
France Transpac
US Telenet currently paywalled but will probably soon be available at
http://www.comsoc.org/commag/history-communications

IEEE Comsoc have a series of so far five articles on history of packet switching, including An Early History of the Internet by Len Kleinrock which starts with:
"It is impossible to place the origins of the Internet in a single moment of time."

The others are of the Internet and related technologies from different perspectives:
UK by Peter Kirstein
Canada Datapac
France Transpac
US Telenet currently paywalled but will probably soon be available at
http://www.comsoc.org/commag/history-communications

IEEE Comsoc have a series of so far five articles on history of packet switching, including An Early History of the Internet by Len Kleinrock which starts with:
"It is impossible to place the origins of the Internet in a single moment of time."

The others are of the Internet and related technologies from different perspectives:
UK by Peter Kirstein
Canada Datapac
France Transpac
US Telenet currently paywalled but will probably soon be available at
http://www.comsoc.org/commag/history-communications

Positioning via GSM uses propagation time, phase differences etc to triangulate the handset from the base stations. According to this report, accuracy down to 100 m can be achievable with these methods.

Having more antennas allows you to do interesting and useful things such as cancelling out multipath and multiuser interference. This has been studied for a long time now.

The three blades give a better shave since when you take one stroke, it takes three. Having four blades, however, is getting a little ridiculous.

Reed's analysis, badly presented in Salon, deals with networks of wireless nodes that not only use frequency diversity (e.g. spread spectrum), but also use multiple antennas for spatial diversity (e.g. phase arrayed antennas) and the nodes cooperate not only for relaying (e.g. mesh network) but also for detecting and eliminating interference.

All of these elements increase the efficiency of radio spectrum use.

Optimal Operation of Wireless Networks

Combined Space Time Diversity and Interference Cancellation for MIMO Networks

Information Theory at the Extremes

Linear Multiuser Receivers: Effective Interference, Effective Bandwidth and User Capacity

Abstract: Multiuser receivers improve the performance of spread-spectrum and antenna-array systems by exploiting the structure of the multiaccess interference when demodulating the signals of a user.

If you are not familiar with NORAD 2-line elements, look at celestrak's documentation. You can also look at celestrak's software archive.

Paper: An Operational and Performance Overview of the IRIDIUM Low Earth Orbit Satellite System -
Stephen R. Pratt, Richard A. Raines, Carl E. Fossa Jr., and Michael A. Temple Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Air Force Institute of Technology

If you are really interested in playing around with looking at the constellation, take a look at one of the best product's around for visualization and prediction, AGI's STK . You can download a modelling limited version of their software for free from their "Resources" tab.

I applaud all those creative technical minds trying to come up with interesting and useful applications for this networks, but without hard info, we're just pissing in the wind and blowing hot air.

There's a fairly recent and detailed IEEE report on the Iridium network

Here's a chart of competing systems that are up, or will be up soon

Here's a fairly complete description of several current satellite telephone systems with info on frequency allocations, ground stations, and other important network details [has a chapter on iridium]

Here's a article in Test System News testing Iridium handsets and network for real world performance

More to come....