4 ms·

For everyone living in an area with no competition other than a singular incumbent telecom or cable company... or perhaps no broadband option at all.... I expec

For everyone living in an area with no competition other than a singular incumbent telecom or cable company... or perhaps no broadband option at all.... I expect 5G fixed wireless to come into play in a big way over the next 5 years. T-Mobile, Verizon and AT&T are going to be eating the cable companies lunch. Likely coaxial networks will become an antique of an older era. the same way POTS (plain old telephone service) did.

drewg123 5y ago
Do they have plans to raise or eliminate data caps? 10-20GB caps just don't work for home internet.
- djrogers 5y ago
  Most carriers don't have hard 10-20Gb data caps anymore, and the fixed 5G services that are rolling out from T-Mobile and Verizon don't either. That data cap thing was very 2015, and I haven't seen one other than a tethering cap for a while...
  - drewg123 5y ago
    Thank you so much for pointing this out. I'd given up on something like this ever happening. I have a colleague living in the northern California wilderness who maintains a point-to-point wifi antenna at the top of a 300' redwood tree because he needs to use a WISP rather than an LTE provider to get uncapped data. I just looked at these plans and they look like a dream come true for him.
  - selectodude 5y ago
    And it's less of a tethering cap and more of a soft cap to stop egregious users. I tether pretty frequently on Verizon and have never noticed any slowdowns.
- ghayes 5y ago
  I have a T-Mobile unlimited 5G data plan. Not exactly inexpensive, but whenever my Wifi acts up, I simply turn it off and barely notice.
- mdasen 5y ago
  Home internet is a new business. T-Mobile already covers 30M households for home internet (around 20-25% of US households, https://www.t-mobile.com/isp https://www.t-mobile.com/isp). Verizon has a more limited LTE home internet program. T-Mobile is currently targeting areas where they have excess capacity, but their capacity will be growing a lot over the next year or two as they launch a lot of new mid-band spectrum. Verizon is also looking to launch new mid-band capacity, however that will probably be a couple years behind given that the spectrum isn't currently free and the fact that Verizon's new spectrum will require more towers for coverage. Still, wireless companies are looking at a lot of new capacity and looking to expand into home internet. Sometimes it's about the technology coming together at the right time to offer a new product. Think about the original iPod. Before then, MP3 players were either sad 32MB players that could only handle 10 songs or large and heavy boxes that weighed a pound and couldn't fit in a pocket. Then the 1" hard-drive came around and Apple shipped the iPod. Without the 1" hard drive, Apple couldn't offer a light-weight, pocketable music player with a 1,000 song capacity. Likewise, without new mid-band spectrum and new 5G technologies, it's very hard for wireless carriers to offer home internet without data caps. However, those new technologies come around and all of a sudden it opens new opportunities. T-Mobile has already started to use some of that new capacity. Their base plans include 100GB of premium data (deprioritized when the network is busy after that) and their new MAX plans have unlimited premium data (never deprioritized). The industry will be working toward home internet over the next 5 years, but it is a reality today for a lot of customers and that will start growing quickly.
  - commoner 5y ago
    Verizon now offers 5G home internet in the few areas where mmWave is available. https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/ https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/
- abawany 5y ago
  The T-Mobile ISP plan doesn't have any caps afaik. Keep in mind that getting it requires a hard pull credit check. They do have other issues though (e.g. their modem selecting a sub-optimal band leading to poor service.)
mschuster91 5y ago
> Likely coaxial networks will become an antique of an older era. the same way POTS (plain old telephone service) did. DSL will become the antique thing since you can't go much more than 50 MBit/s outside of urban areas with short distances due to piss poor old cables, while DOCSIS can already deliver 10 GBit/s over way longer distances because the shielded cable allows way more effective transmission. Upgrades (aka splitting the trunk to provide more bandwidth to the customers on one branch) are relatively easy to do, whereas upgrading 5G capacity is a legal hellhole - you need permits, pay rent to whomever's house you're setting up the cell, and the base station and antenna hardware is expensive. Don't get me wrong, 5G will be extremely useful for rural areas as it's way cheaper to build out than wiring up houses with DSL/cable... but where there is cable (and the cable is somewhat-ish affordable), people will choose cable over 5G.
- selectodude 5y ago
  >but where there is cable (and the cable is somewhat-ish affordable), people will choose cable over 5G. I think you may be surprised. In my old area, people are leaving Comcast in droves for T-Mobile's 5G service, not because it's all that much better or all that much cheaper, but because they've been taking it from Comcast for two decades now and they finally have an opportunity to show their displeasure.
  - fencepost 5y ago
    And if it doesn't work out after a few months they can go back to Comcast and qualify for new customer promos. There's no contract requirement on the T-Mobile service.
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    That sounds like "where the cable is affordable and they don't have a long-standing, heavily justified grudge against the company running it", which is a fair caveat, but doesn't seem to invalidate the parent's underlying claim.
  - asdff 5y ago
    How many good years do we have left until comcast purchases t-mobile?
mdasen 5y ago
Yes! T-Mobile is aiming to have 7-8M home broadband customers in 2025. Their home broadband business is relatively small right now, but it should be expanding fast. To put that in perspective, Verizon Fios only serves around 5M customers. Getting 7-8M customers would probably make T-Mobile the 4th largest home broadband provider behind Comcast, Charter, and AT&T. Verizon has also announced that it's looking to cover 50M households with home broadband in 2024. While not as ambitious as T-Mobile, that's still around 40% of households getting new home broadband competition. I'm less confident that coax will go the way of POTS. DOCSIS 3.0, 3.1, and 4.0 can offer pretty decent speeds and the networks are already built. I think the coming competition will push DOCSIS-based systems to actually offer better service. Comcast can and does offer gigabit service today, but they tend to charge a lot for it as a premium service. While I'm very bullish about wireless home internet (especially as carriers deploy mid-band spectrum with T-Mobile leading the way in 2021 and Verizon and AT&T following in the 2022-2024 time-frame), I think we're still going to see certain limitations with wireless. I don't think that will matter to most people. Most people just want to be able to stream video, Zoom, etc. They don't need gigabit speeds. Heck, 5 HD video streams can fit into 25Mbps. Even if wireless home internet won't be a great option for some power-users, the fact that it will be an option for so many people will make it a lot harder for cable companies to be mean to their customers.
jellicle 5y ago
One phone company and one cable company is what most people have now for broadband competition. How will that change?
- mdasen 5y ago
  Most people don't actually have a phone company for "broadband". Right now, "broadband" is defined as at least 25Mbps down and DSL often tops out at 3-7Mbps. While 25Mbps will fit a few HD streams and might (5 by Netflix's specs), 3Mbps DSL simply doesn't offer the ability to watch HD video and likely makes things like Zoom a very rough experience. I think it's also likely that a lot of people will end up seeing 2-3 wireless broadband options given that there are three wireless carriers. Maybe you live in a Fios area so you feel like there is competition. I wish I lived in a Fios area. For so many people, wireless home internet means getting another competitor (or another 2 or 3 new competitors). I have access to Verizon DSL at 3Mbps. I can't leave my cable company for that. I could leave my cable company for wireless home internet in the 25-300Mbps range.
dboreham 5y ago
Upon what physics do you base this assertion? To me (just an EE with 20 years experience deploying and running Wisp services...) it sounds delusional.
- function_seven 5y ago
  I have no credentials, so correct me. Do the high 5G frequencies (Frequency Range 2) lend themselves to tiny cells with no contention? I'm talking a radio for every ~50/100 subscribers or so, placed on light posts and telephone poles.
- zeroxfe 5y ago
  ugh, would you please explain why you think that isn't possible instead of throwing around your credentials and calling gp delusional.
  - matmatmatmat 5y ago
    OP could've admittedly done a better job with this, but let me give it a try. The problem comes down to spectrum, how much power you can push across that spectrum, and how you share that spectrum with other devices. The more bandwidth you have available, the more power you can send across it, and the fewer devices you have sharing it, the higher your information rate between a sender and receiver. 5G, in theory, brings a lot of spectrum to the table, so they can talk about, say 1 Gb/s or 10 Gb/s connections. The problem is, you've got to find a way to share that among users. Sharing spectrum is never a 1/n process because of inefficiencies, so you end up with a bit under 1/n speed for n users. Meanwhile, cables might have less spectrum, but you can push comparatively more power through them, but more crucially, everyone gets their own connection and there's much less noise. So, more aggregate bandwidth across cables than over the air. This is all very handwavy, so if someone would like to put some numbers to this and/or fix any mistakes I made, please have at it.
    - brigade 5y ago
      > everyone gets their own connection Technically, everyone on the same cable node shares the same spectrum (typically targeting 200-500 subscribers.) Which is effectively 1GHz at the moment, a decent chunk of which is dedicated to TV. But certainly there's less noise, neighboring nodes effectively don't interfere with each other, and nodes can be made arbitrarily dense.
suyash 5y ago
Make sure you know that with that you're also getting large amount of radiation...that is why I prefer fiber or cable internet vs antenna based.
- OJFord 5y ago
  If you sign up early enough they might bundle a tin foil hat for free.
irrational 5y ago
I live in a concrete house. Our phones don't receive wireless signals inside the house and we can't get wife on any floor except the main one where the router is. At least for houses like mine, cat-6 will be around for the foreseeable future.

drewg123 5y ago

Do they have plans to raise or eliminate data caps? 10-20GB caps just don't work for home internet.

djrogers 5y ago
Most carriers don't have hard 10-20Gb data caps anymore, and the fixed 5G services that are rolling out from T-Mobile and Verizon don't either. That data cap thing was very 2015, and I haven't seen one other than a tethering cap for a while...
- drewg123 5y ago
  Thank you so much for pointing this out. I'd given up on something like this ever happening. I have a colleague living in the northern California wilderness who maintains a point-to-point wifi antenna at the top of a 300' redwood tree because he needs to use a WISP rather than an LTE provider to get uncapped data. I just looked at these plans and they look like a dream come true for him.
- selectodude 5y ago
  And it's less of a tethering cap and more of a soft cap to stop egregious users. I tether pretty frequently on Verizon and have never noticed any slowdowns.
ghayes 5y ago
I have a T-Mobile unlimited 5G data plan. Not exactly inexpensive, but whenever my Wifi acts up, I simply turn it off and barely notice.
mdasen 5y ago
Home internet is a new business. T-Mobile already covers 30M households for home internet (around 20-25% of US households, https://www.t-mobile.com/isp https://www.t-mobile.com/isp). Verizon has a more limited LTE home internet program. T-Mobile is currently targeting areas where they have excess capacity, but their capacity will be growing a lot over the next year or two as they launch a lot of new mid-band spectrum. Verizon is also looking to launch new mid-band capacity, however that will probably be a couple years behind given that the spectrum isn't currently free and the fact that Verizon's new spectrum will require more towers for coverage. Still, wireless companies are looking at a lot of new capacity and looking to expand into home internet. Sometimes it's about the technology coming together at the right time to offer a new product. Think about the original iPod. Before then, MP3 players were either sad 32MB players that could only handle 10 songs or large and heavy boxes that weighed a pound and couldn't fit in a pocket. Then the 1" hard-drive came around and Apple shipped the iPod. Without the 1" hard drive, Apple couldn't offer a light-weight, pocketable music player with a 1,000 song capacity. Likewise, without new mid-band spectrum and new 5G technologies, it's very hard for wireless carriers to offer home internet without data caps. However, those new technologies come around and all of a sudden it opens new opportunities. T-Mobile has already started to use some of that new capacity. Their base plans include 100GB of premium data (deprioritized when the network is busy after that) and their new MAX plans have unlimited premium data (never deprioritized). The industry will be working toward home internet over the next 5 years, but it is a reality today for a lot of customers and that will start growing quickly.
- commoner 5y ago
  Verizon now offers 5G home internet in the few areas where mmWave is available. https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/ https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/
abawany 5y ago
The T-Mobile ISP plan doesn't have any caps afaik. Keep in mind that getting it requires a hard pull credit check. They do have other issues though (e.g. their modem selecting a sub-optimal band leading to poor service.)

mschuster91 5y ago

> Likely coaxial networks will become an antique of an older era. the same way POTS (plain old telephone service) did. DSL will become the antique thing since you can't go much more than 50 MBit/s outside of urban areas with short distances due to piss poor old cables, while DOCSIS can already deliver 10 GBit/s over way longer distances because the shielded cable allows way more effective transmission. Upgrades (aka splitting the trunk to provide more bandwidth to the customers on one branch) are relatively easy to do, whereas upgrading 5G capacity is a legal hellhole - you need permits, pay rent to whomever's house you're setting up the cell, and the base station and antenna hardware is expensive. Don't get me wrong, 5G will be extremely useful for rural areas as it's way cheaper to build out than wiring up houses with DSL/cable... but where there is cable (and the cable is somewhat-ish affordable), people will choose cable over 5G.

selectodude 5y ago
>but where there is cable (and the cable is somewhat-ish affordable), people will choose cable over 5G. I think you may be surprised. In my old area, people are leaving Comcast in droves for T-Mobile's 5G service, not because it's all that much better or all that much cheaper, but because they've been taking it from Comcast for two decades now and they finally have an opportunity to show their displeasure.
- fencepost 5y ago
  And if it doesn't work out after a few months they can go back to Comcast and qualify for new customer promos. There's no contract requirement on the T-Mobile service.
- a1369209993 5y ago
  That sounds like "where the cable is affordable and they don't have a long-standing, heavily justified grudge against the company running it", which is a fair caveat, but doesn't seem to invalidate the parent's underlying claim.
- asdff 5y ago
  How many good years do we have left until comcast purchases t-mobile?

mdasen 5y ago

Yes! T-Mobile is aiming to have 7-8M home broadband customers in 2025. Their home broadband business is relatively small right now, but it should be expanding fast. To put that in perspective, Verizon Fios only serves around 5M customers. Getting 7-8M customers would probably make T-Mobile the 4th largest home broadband provider behind Comcast, Charter, and AT&T. Verizon has also announced that it's looking to cover 50M households with home broadband in 2024. While not as ambitious as T-Mobile, that's still around 40% of households getting new home broadband competition. I'm less confident that coax will go the way of POTS. DOCSIS 3.0, 3.1, and 4.0 can offer pretty decent speeds and the networks are already built. I think the coming competition will push DOCSIS-based systems to actually offer better service. Comcast can and does offer gigabit service today, but they tend to charge a lot for it as a premium service. While I'm very bullish about wireless home internet (especially as carriers deploy mid-band spectrum with T-Mobile leading the way in 2021 and Verizon and AT&T following in the 2022-2024 time-frame), I think we're still going to see certain limitations with wireless. I don't think that will matter to most people. Most people just want to be able to stream video, Zoom, etc. They don't need gigabit speeds. Heck, 5 HD video streams can fit into 25Mbps. Even if wireless home internet won't be a great option for some power-users, the fact that it will be an option for so many people will make it a lot harder for cable companies to be mean to their customers.

jellicle 5y ago

One phone company and one cable company is what most people have now for broadband competition. How will that change?

mdasen 5y ago
Most people don't actually have a phone company for "broadband". Right now, "broadband" is defined as at least 25Mbps down and DSL often tops out at 3-7Mbps. While 25Mbps will fit a few HD streams and might (5 by Netflix's specs), 3Mbps DSL simply doesn't offer the ability to watch HD video and likely makes things like Zoom a very rough experience. I think it's also likely that a lot of people will end up seeing 2-3 wireless broadband options given that there are three wireless carriers. Maybe you live in a Fios area so you feel like there is competition. I wish I lived in a Fios area. For so many people, wireless home internet means getting another competitor (or another 2 or 3 new competitors). I have access to Verizon DSL at 3Mbps. I can't leave my cable company for that. I could leave my cable company for wireless home internet in the 25-300Mbps range.

dboreham 5y ago

Upon what physics do you base this assertion? To me (just an EE with 20 years experience deploying and running Wisp services...) it sounds delusional.

function_seven 5y ago
I have no credentials, so correct me. Do the high 5G frequencies (Frequency Range 2) lend themselves to tiny cells with no contention? I'm talking a radio for every ~50/100 subscribers or so, placed on light posts and telephone poles.
zeroxfe 5y ago
ugh, would you please explain why you think that isn't possible instead of throwing around your credentials and calling gp delusional.
- matmatmatmat 5y ago
  OP could've admittedly done a better job with this, but let me give it a try. The problem comes down to spectrum, how much power you can push across that spectrum, and how you share that spectrum with other devices. The more bandwidth you have available, the more power you can send across it, and the fewer devices you have sharing it, the higher your information rate between a sender and receiver. 5G, in theory, brings a lot of spectrum to the table, so they can talk about, say 1 Gb/s or 10 Gb/s connections. The problem is, you've got to find a way to share that among users. Sharing spectrum is never a 1/n process because of inefficiencies, so you end up with a bit under 1/n speed for n users. Meanwhile, cables might have less spectrum, but you can push comparatively more power through them, but more crucially, everyone gets their own connection and there's much less noise. So, more aggregate bandwidth across cables than over the air. This is all very handwavy, so if someone would like to put some numbers to this and/or fix any mistakes I made, please have at it.
  - brigade 5y ago
    > everyone gets their own connection Technically, everyone on the same cable node shares the same spectrum (typically targeting 200-500 subscribers.) Which is effectively 1GHz at the moment, a decent chunk of which is dedicated to TV. But certainly there's less noise, neighboring nodes effectively don't interfere with each other, and nodes can be made arbitrarily dense.

suyash 5y ago

Make sure you know that with that you're also getting large amount of radiation...that is why I prefer fiber or cable internet vs antenna based.

OJFord 5y ago
If you sign up early enough they might bundle a tin foil hat for free.

irrational 5y ago

I live in a concrete house. Our phones don't receive wireless signals inside the house and we can't get wife on any floor except the main one where the router is. At least for houses like mine, cat-6 will be around for the foreseeable future.