3 ms·

> Every home internet connection will be by 'mobile' internet, that's my prediction. I highly doubt it. There's only so much capacity per base station, so the

by gspr 5y ago

> Every home internet connection will be by 'mobile' internet, that's my prediction. I highly doubt it. There's only so much capacity per base station, so the amount of base stations needed would be prohibitive in urban settings. I honestly don't think this is a serious plan even by cell companies, except in rural settings. That isn't to say that they won't dupe some number of urban dwellers into it, too. Enough to earn some money, not enough to overload capacity.

OJFord 5y ago
> I honestly don't think this is a serious plan even by cell companies, except in rural settings. I can't speak for their seriousness obviously, but EE (major provider in the UK) is advertising wait-list sign-up/'coming soon' in London. I recall tube ads years ago (it was probably 4G, but certainly not 5) for a minor player that sprung up using someone else's network (Three/EE/O2/Vodafone, I don't know) specifically to provide home internet. I think they got killed by uncapped/high cap data becoming more common, tethering being more allowed; so anyone who cared could use any provider (and any modem) directly - and most people don't care they just want it to work at a good price and be easy. I think EE will make it an opt-in up-sell for now, but that eventually they (and others) will just send SIMs & modems out instead of 'engineers'. No more copper lines to faff about with. If the customer wants a landline number, well that's just adding minutes on to their SIM plan. (And for a while they'll get away with charging through the nose for that, like the old £15pcm line rental or whatever, until the masses realise that any SIM would work, and most high/unlimited data ones have lots of if not unlimited minutes included anyway.)
- gspr 5y ago
  Of course they'll try to lure in as many as they can. What I'm saying is that their plan surely can't be to have most people on this kind of service in urban settings. It just won't work!
vel0city 5y ago
It probably won't be every home, but certainly some percentage of customers could be covered by fixed wireless pretty easily enough. It then becomes yet another point of competition for wired network providers. This was previously the dream with 4G/WiMAX, but ultimately they weren't able to have enough bandwidth per tower to make it reasonable. 5G has much better efficiency enabling way more clients per tower and far more throughput. And its definitely a serious plan by cell companies. Several companies are already selling this. Obviously, they're not exactly planning every home, but enough to actually market it as a real service. https://www.t-mobile.com/isp https://www.t-mobile.com/isp https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/ https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/
- gspr 5y ago
  I'm struggling to see how this pays off for them. The amount of base stations they'd have to put up and maintain seems ludicrous. Surely it'll be cheaper, in a densely populated area, to build out fiber (which the base stations need anyway)! But yeah, I don't doubt that they'll try to lure a good amount of people in. Enough to make some free money, not enough to have to actually invest more in the network. Kinda like how ISPs (at least in Europe) were heavily pushing ISDN onto people as we stood before the dawn of DSL. I doubt it'll be a large proportion of urban users though. I must admit I lived for a year on this kind of service, but this was because the town I lived in had some strange some strange local government monopoly on ISPs, and the monopolist delivered service that was barely usable (not hyperbole). The mobile providers circumvented this by "not being ISPs", and while what they offered was as terrible as everyone else in this thread has related, it beat out the even more terrible monopolist cable offer. I switched to fiber as soon as the monopoly was lifted.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    There's a few things where it starts to make more sense. 1) In the US, its stupid expensive and difficult to be yet another provider laying cables to people's homes. When it comes to coax and fiber, there aren't local exchange carriers in residential areas; the company who laid the cable is the only one able to offer services on that cable. For another ISP to come in to compete at all, there's a massive amount of red tape and cost to lay essentially redundant cabling. Launching a new wireline ISP is stupid expensive and there's a lack of viable competition in many markets. 2) Cell companies have spent years splitting cells and making smaller and smaller cells in suburban areas. They've been building small towers all over the place and just about every water tower and office building these days has tons of antennas on it. So there's plenty of places to stick new equipment in suburban areas. 3) 5G is both a more efficient protocol and also a lot of new spectrum. So they can continue to use the low-band frequencies they're using for 3G/4G service for mobile users while then offering new services on the newer bands. Since they already have lots of places to stick antennas with fiber already laid, this is overall pretty cheap to more than double the capacity per tower. In reality, its far more than double, probably several times as much bandwidth per tower as the newer frequencies can help split the same tower into smaller sectors per tower. 4) A lot of those new bands are pretty much trash for mobile users in suburban settings. Low on the ground, in a car, deep inside a home, you're not going to get much service. However, if you put a small antenna near a window facing the tower, you'll get excellent service. So to recap, there's a good bit of room for more competition in home internet services. There's already lots of places which are already set up to hang antennas with plenty of backhaul connectivity, so adding a ton of capacity per existing cell isn't terribly expensive for the carriers. 5G allows for more bands with far more bandwidth available overall. A lot of the new bands are trash for mobile users in many spaces, but are very practical for fixed wireless. This means fixed wireless 5G could become very competitive with wireline services in suburban and rural residential internet markets.

by gspr 5y ago

OJFord 5y ago

> I honestly don't think this is a serious plan even by cell companies, except in rural settings. I can't speak for their seriousness obviously, but EE (major provider in the UK) is advertising wait-list sign-up/'coming soon' in London. I recall tube ads years ago (it was probably 4G, but certainly not 5) for a minor player that sprung up using someone else's network (Three/EE/O2/Vodafone, I don't know) specifically to provide home internet. I think they got killed by uncapped/high cap data becoming more common, tethering being more allowed; so anyone who cared could use any provider (and any modem) directly - and most people don't care they just want it to work at a good price and be easy. I think EE will make it an opt-in up-sell for now, but that eventually they (and others) will just send SIMs & modems out instead of 'engineers'. No more copper lines to faff about with. If the customer wants a landline number, well that's just adding minutes on to their SIM plan. (And for a while they'll get away with charging through the nose for that, like the old £15pcm line rental or whatever, until the masses realise that any SIM would work, and most high/unlimited data ones have lots of if not unlimited minutes included anyway.)

gspr 5y ago
Of course they'll try to lure in as many as they can. What I'm saying is that their plan surely can't be to have most people on this kind of service in urban settings. It just won't work!

vel0city 5y ago

It probably won't be every home, but certainly some percentage of customers could be covered by fixed wireless pretty easily enough. It then becomes yet another point of competition for wired network providers. This was previously the dream with 4G/WiMAX, but ultimately they weren't able to have enough bandwidth per tower to make it reasonable. 5G has much better efficiency enabling way more clients per tower and far more throughput. And its definitely a serious plan by cell companies. Several companies are already selling this. Obviously, they're not exactly planning every home, but enough to actually market it as a real service. https://www.t-mobile.com/isp https://www.t-mobile.com/isp https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/ https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/

gspr 5y ago
I'm struggling to see how this pays off for them. The amount of base stations they'd have to put up and maintain seems ludicrous. Surely it'll be cheaper, in a densely populated area, to build out fiber (which the base stations need anyway)! But yeah, I don't doubt that they'll try to lure a good amount of people in. Enough to make some free money, not enough to have to actually invest more in the network. Kinda like how ISPs (at least in Europe) were heavily pushing ISDN onto people as we stood before the dawn of DSL. I doubt it'll be a large proportion of urban users though. I must admit I lived for a year on this kind of service, but this was because the town I lived in had some strange some strange local government monopoly on ISPs, and the monopolist delivered service that was barely usable (not hyperbole). The mobile providers circumvented this by "not being ISPs", and while what they offered was as terrible as everyone else in this thread has related, it beat out the even more terrible monopolist cable offer. I switched to fiber as soon as the monopoly was lifted.
- vel0city 5y ago
  There's a few things where it starts to make more sense. 1) In the US, its stupid expensive and difficult to be yet another provider laying cables to people's homes. When it comes to coax and fiber, there aren't local exchange carriers in residential areas; the company who laid the cable is the only one able to offer services on that cable. For another ISP to come in to compete at all, there's a massive amount of red tape and cost to lay essentially redundant cabling. Launching a new wireline ISP is stupid expensive and there's a lack of viable competition in many markets. 2) Cell companies have spent years splitting cells and making smaller and smaller cells in suburban areas. They've been building small towers all over the place and just about every water tower and office building these days has tons of antennas on it. So there's plenty of places to stick new equipment in suburban areas. 3) 5G is both a more efficient protocol and also a lot of new spectrum. So they can continue to use the low-band frequencies they're using for 3G/4G service for mobile users while then offering new services on the newer bands. Since they already have lots of places to stick antennas with fiber already laid, this is overall pretty cheap to more than double the capacity per tower. In reality, its far more than double, probably several times as much bandwidth per tower as the newer frequencies can help split the same tower into smaller sectors per tower. 4) A lot of those new bands are pretty much trash for mobile users in suburban settings. Low on the ground, in a car, deep inside a home, you're not going to get much service. However, if you put a small antenna near a window facing the tower, you'll get excellent service. So to recap, there's a good bit of room for more competition in home internet services. There's already lots of places which are already set up to hang antennas with plenty of backhaul connectivity, so adding a ton of capacity per existing cell isn't terribly expensive for the carriers. 5G allows for more bands with far more bandwidth available overall. A lot of the new bands are trash for mobile users in many spaces, but are very practical for fixed wireless. This means fixed wireless 5G could become very competitive with wireline services in suburban and rural residential internet markets.