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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

by 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

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.