Wireless consumes more energy. So it is more enironmentally friendly to go with wires, especially fiber. Personally I like to have both, wired main connection and wireless as backup.

Is it though? What’s the environmental footprint of manufacturing, installing, and maintaining all of those wires?

While not as much, installing and maintaining the 5G endpoints also requires all that, and they generally have to be wired to achieve low latency, meshing only does so much and the speed of light is going to win out for backhauls.

A lot lower than manufacturing chips to do the complex signal processing needed for fast and reliable wireless.

If it costs more, I wouldn't pick wireless. Losing the wire for my home internet gains me nothing.

I don't trust that the wireless solution would be equivalent, though this may be because I've been burned too many times living in concrete houses that block cellphone signal rather effectively.

It isn’t equivalent. Optical fiber beats 5G on those criteria.

Wireless is inherently easier to accidentally get disrupted. When wired internet fails, it is rarely the wire. More importantly, if it is the wire that is easy to check and fix.

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.

Wireless does has an advantage in terms of redundancy. If the nearest tower fails, you can probably also use another one nearby. Not so with wired connections, where the whole signal chain needs to be intact. Even if the whole network fails, you can probably switch SIM and use a different network.

I suppose you don't live rurally...

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.

You can have such redundancy for wire too. People simply figured out that it’s so reliable there is no need for extra redundancy.

Wireless should be the exception, not the norm. When you really need a device to move.

Well I could make that assumption... and make the whole conversation pointless.

I would hate to have all the devices in my house connect directly to a wireless signal from the ISP, for example. I manage the DNS and firewall to control what goes on. Giving up that control means more ads and more tracking and nothing good for me. Having fiber come into the house has no drawbacks that I can see, so why trade that away for something worse?