In scattered environment the range is too short to excuse the cost of covering it with 5G
There is no niche for it except for "my landlord didn't install proper internet so I use 5G" coz it happened to be alreadhy in range
You're welcome to get your own contract, but if they don't have permission by the owner to dig into the ground and drill into walls to run the lines to you and a place to put meters and equipment, you're not getting the internet/gas.
> everyone rents and you are dependent on landlords for your internet contract as well as your actual ethernet connection
We have mandated infrastructure sharing both for fixed and wireless networks so the competition is pretty good with virtual operators almost always being cheaper than the brand name owning the infra.
... if you even have the choice. Many Americans are only served by a single provider, and this isn't the "too rural" excuse but also with many metropolitan areas. There are exceptions, such as with Utopia Fiber (https://www.utopiafiber.com/) in metropolitan parts of Utah, but this isn't the case even in California, New York or Texas.
It's very different in the US/CA/AU and many other regions of the world. In the former, you are quite likely to rent from a corporate landlord. In many other regions, there are very few corporate landlords.
I am a sole proprietor landlord with one property, but also a shareholder in a large company which lets properties. I can be agreeable with my direct tenants in my own property. I always let them make small modifications to the property - fiber lines, hanging things on walls, swapping out furniture to an extent. And I don't mind discussing ideas like a complete remodel of the property if my tenants are long-term. But it is tremendously difficult for me to be so agreeable to my indirect tenants through the corporate landlord in which I am a shareholder.
Fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits is enshrined in law in the US since the original precedent in Dodge v The Ford Motor Company in 1919. Similar laws exist all over the world. They create a perverse and probably sociopathic environment for managers working in corporate landlords. They must maximize profit and do it this quarter. If a tenant would increase their rent payments on the condition that they can fund their own fibre line to the property, then it is in the interest of the business' managers. If a tenant demands that the business fund a fibre line and they are unwilling to pay more rent, then showing such charity is not in the interests of the business managers. In fact, strictly speaking, such a courtesy to the tenant is against the law.
With that said, shareholders can waive this fiduciary responsibility of their managers to maximize profit. But in my limited experience, in the US, every shareholder has to independently agree to this. And in very large corporate landlords with private and corporate investors, it is practically impossible.
All in all, rent from a small landlord and it won't be a problem. In most of the world, nearly all landlords are private. Proportionally, there are markedly more corporate landlords in the US, Canada, and Australia than in most other regions of the world.
I might be wrong about some of this so I would welcome a discussion. But this is what I've observed.
Recently they put in ‘fiber to the node’ to a nearby crossroads, I now have two 18 Mbps lines which, fortunately, give about 100% of the rated performance so I can’t complain much. I can even use Docker now, YouTube, Netflix, and online gaming are all pretty good. (The Samsung TV, outside of game mode, and some monitors, like the monitor on an Alienware ‘gaming’ laptop, add more lag than the DSL does.). I have a load balancer that sends different connections on different lines so collectively the system meets the FCC broadband definition. Still the people down the road get better speeds without the load balancer for less money.
I’d say it is not just a ‘lack of competition’ but ‘pernicious competition’ that is going on here. For instance, the cable company has less reason to serve my valley because people who want TV can get it from satellite. There are plenty of old and poor people who would rather spend $65 a month for 1 Mbps DSL than $70 for 300 Mbps cable and they will go to public meetings to try to keep the better service away. So in some sense competition from legacy satellite and legacy telco makes service worse.
(TV of course is a great case study of ‘pernicious competition’ because of the structure of the industry. Your local OTA TV station tries to keep a secret that you can tune in free with an antenna because they get cash when you subscribe to cable. There is cable, multiple satellite providers, plus a number of IPTV providers but they all provide the same bundle at the same price. There is no way I can say I want CNBC and Bloomberg and the BBC but CNN, Fox and MSNBC can all go to hell. Given that they get paid no matter if people watch they have no need to maintain quality or a brand promise. CNN tried to go direct-to-consumer but decided it didn’t want to threaten the current cash cow even though it may be a doomed business…. It’s hard to tell because there are powerful forces that will try to rebuild the bundle out of Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus and all that.)
In contrast, I personally do not derive any pleasure from liberating my home internet gateway from a cable that goes to the wall.
Sure, for the use cases where, for example, you're moving too much, wireless is good
But you get an inferior experience on most other cases, for example, switching it from one device to another, not to mention spectrum crowding etc
I almost always have a better experience switching from one device to another. It’s zero extra taps (just play/pause of some content on the second device) on my Jabra earphones or zero to one taps for my AirPods (one if they’re already playing media on the original device).
Compare that to wired headphones, which I would need to unplug and then snake around my desk to the second device.
Yet many of the same people demand wired internet. Hence I don't believe wireless internet and headphones are comparable.
I don't game, so don't care about ping.
So, where I am, using 4G for my home internet is faster and cheaper, and I can gift data to my phone. I have not had any issues with reliability.
We've had 4G for ten years or more now, I'm not ready to put my faith in 5G and don't expect to be any time soon.
I almost signed up for a new office a mile from the centre where the best cable speed on offer was 20Mbps and the thought of relying upon mobile internet was enough to make me think twice.
I'm currently in semi-rural location, no mobile service at all indoors but, 200 metres from the fibre cable cabinet, enjoying cheap and reliable 60Mbps without a hitch.
3UK have thousands (maybe 10k?) new masts in planning to really improve 5G coverage (and they have the spectrum to actually deliver 2gig/sec to phones in the real world). Annoyingly the (vast in many cases) majority will are being rejected on suprious grounds by the council.
Conspiracy theories regarding harmful radiation can also be a factor.
Several other companies could provide similar speeds at similar (some lower) costs through a fibre connection, which was installed throughout the building.
5G home broadband seems like a fix for when the market for wired options is broken.
I've got access to 4 seperate FTTH providers now in my apartment (all using different infrastructure, not including resellers): VM, Openreach (BT) FTTP, Hyperoptic and now Community fibre.
The limiting factor on speed now is WiFi, which cannot manage 1gig even closer to the router.
As long as the manufacturer foots the eSIM bill (and it's profitable) they can serve ads.
But mature 5g isn't supposed to be any of those.
Not really. The link layer is encrypted, and you're almost certainly running SSL on top of it.
It’s 20-30x faster than my VDSL2 line and only £8/month more expensive
And apart from the day of the Queens funeral it’s been really reliable
On the day of the funeral throughput was like 28kbps, whereas 4G from the same tower was 100Mbps so I presume the teleco had an internal network issue with their 5G backhaul / network (probably sold all the capacity to broadcasters)
With wireless internet, disruption can be caused by many things. That makes diagnosing a problem so much harder. Incidentally it also tends to be less reliable.
Besides that, the massive complexity of the technology stack makes wireless harder to manage, configure, figure out compatibility for, and more prone to software bugs.
But they both have trade-offs. Wireless allows many connections at once rather easily at the cost of interference and (potentially) speed and reliability, cable is more expensive up front if infrastructure isn't already there.
Sounds like short sighted view of the decade
5G has an option for higher frequency towers with signals that drop off much quicker, allowing you to pack towers closer together. Hence giving city centers much more bandwidth.
Down in the suburbs you can still get away with fewer towers with larger range and still give everyone bandwidth.
Out in the countryside is where the problem you propose starts occurring. When the people are so spread out that a single cell is going to be woefully underutilized, and hence not built close enough to your home. But that cross-over is beyond the suburbs, not around the city center.
I expect the future is that rural moves to mostly wireless and inner city areas continue to be connected to fiber.
In Australia we have mostly failed to provide good wired internet to rural areas so they are moving to starlink while the cities are largely connected to fiber now.
One of them is the mm wave which is very high performance over line of site, makes the most of diffraction so it often does well near-line-of-site, then quits working. It is particularly unsuited for handsets because your hand and other body parts can block the antenna. This is a great answer for FWA in favorable geography.
The other 5G is similar to 4G but a bit better performing and my understanding it is actually a bit cheaper for the carrier. 4G infrastructure manages a higher level of spectral efficiency than people thought possible before because of the very close coordination between towers, they actually pipe the baseband signal (around 100 MHz bandwidth) by fiber optic to a central location and process the signals collectively. My understanding is that 5G has a system for coordinating the towers that is still efficient, but not so crazy expensive. So it is ironic that carriers market 5G as something that costs consumers more money because the real driver for it, from the telco perspective, is lower costs.
For that, you want fast and low latency and that means a dense amount of cell towers. The fact that “real 5g” has a shorter range is actually a positive. It means you can make your shit super dense.