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Comment by joezydeco | Hacker News Reader

5G's main application around the world will be more capacity, a good thing for telcos

Or companies that want to break the residential broadband monopoly in a local area. Personally, I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town. 5G would be a complete success if that happens.

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This is the key. Look at the roadblocks Google Fiber has hit in their own fiber deployments, pivoting to wireless to bypass the resistance they're getting from incumbents.

I'm interested to see how this plays out. When I looked into it, it seemed hard to compete with wired broadband internet. I think wireless has the best chance in areas where people's only option is satellite or dial-up.

Why? TMO is faster than Comcast, they just need more capacity.

Because there's only so much wireless spectrum and at some point you saturate the link. Plus interference from other carriers reduces the capacity of the link.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's also not obvious to me that wireless is better in dense areas, especially since the main cost in wired internet is laying the cable in the first place, which is easier to do cost effectively when you have an urban market to offer service to.

How can there be interference between different carriers, if each is using their own spectrum?

It depends on whether it is licensed or unlicensed spectrum. Some of the technology is in ISM bands that anyone can use.

In either case, the channels still have capacity limits. I'm not saying it's impossible, which is partly why I brought it up in the first place. I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would chime in. The main advantage wires have is you can just run more of them when you reach your capacity (or in some cases you can just change the hardware at either end of the wire to newer technology).

Are there any US carriers that are using unlicensed / shares spectrum?

The bandwidth is only limited per tower, you can easily double the throughput of a given area by doubling the number of cell towers (and reducing power to avoid interference). It’s a lot cheaper to build a new tower than to run new wires to 200 homes (permits and all). On top of that 5g gives 10x bandwidth over 4g in the same band.

Meh.

You can have 1,000 wires in a bit of pipe, effectively 1,000 "spectrums." The air will always only be a single spectrum.

Cell division does not scale infinitely, and becomes more and more complex to manage.

Running cable you do once, then you can benefit for a long time. Wired will always be the better technical solution, and more economic one, in built up areas.

I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town

Is Comcast really that bad? In my admittedly European experience all the service providers are (dis)functional and greedy pretty much to the same degree, none of them are good guys.

It's even worse.

I live in a Cox area. They offer fine service, but they are monopolistic and keep increasing prices.

Comcast and Countrywide were in the running for the Consumerists 2008 worst company of the year. Countrywide won but had to help nuke the economy. Comcast had a real shot at winning for being such a malignant organization.

The rebrand to Xfinity is a joke.

Why? Are they significantly more hated than any big co? Like Uber and Facebook received quite a lot of bad press lately. Is this just perception or are they really that bad/evil?

TMO (yeah Austria, not US but still) were bragging about not hashing passwords on twitter just a couple of weeks ago. Not exactly professional.

Well good companies are one which write same CRUD apps Nth time. And then in few months/years they either shutdown or join forces with a bad company.

In the US they are. Comcast has rather notorious Customer Retention policies and frequent abuse of their position as monopolies in many cities, whether it's a matter of the prices, the data caps, the script injections, the promises made to cities that never materialize, and so on.

It's basically like comic book villainy, the only thing missing is photos of Comcast Executives cackling over the complaints from customers. And I say that as someone who was overall okay with Comcast's service the one time I had them. The behavior of Comcast defines the perception most of the US has with them.

It can be. I've so far had only good experiences. My service is fast and reliable, and the other day when I called them up to activate a new modem, they cut my cost to $35/month as a customer appreciation move with barely any strings attached (only that I commit to staying with them a year ... I've been with them for 6 already and there is no viable competitor here).

There are plenty of horror stories, however. I may just be lucky so far.

Same. I’ve had nothing but fine experiences with them.

Comcast is the only broadband provider in my town that can deliver a service greater than 2 mbit/sec.

AT&T has U-Verse DSLAMS in some corners, but gave up on covering the entire town and the copper network is old and crumbling. There is zero hope of any kind of fiber service showing up.

In my personal experience Comcast's service isn't bad, but their rates are tied to the fact that there is no competition. My belief is that prices would drop about 50% and speeds would jump up 20% if another company could get into the space.

And that's just for IP service. Video service is another story altogether. TMO's purchase of Layer3 gives me some hope that maybe there will be a decent streaming service they will bundle with it.

> In my personal experience Comcast's service isn't bad, but their rates are tied to the fact that there is no competition.

Yep. My town has exactly one provider: Comcast. They even negotiated a 50-year exclusive right of way back in the 80s by lining some local politician pockets.

I pay $250/month for internet, landline phone, and basic cable bundle.

This includes about $50 worth of bullshit “copper recovery fees” and the like which are designed to sound like taxes but are really just pure profit for Comcast.

I was a Comcast customer for years. The service was unreliable. The phone support was useless and would, for example, ask me to reboot my computer when my modem was clearly failing to communicate with their equipment. Their techs would routinely arrive an hour or two late when they already had a four-hour window to hit, and not even call to tell me they would be late. One of them replaced something in an outside box and then just left, leaving two equipment boxes hanging open and scraps of cable lying on the ground.

I now have Verizon and the difference is vast. The service has gone down twice in five years. When I called it in, I was immediately connected to someone who knew what DHCP meant. They’re not perfect but they’re a lot better.

Ha, I had the same problem with Time Warner re: leaving boxes open and cables laying around. In that case, they never told me they had come and I waited nearly a week (they said they had to come put more cable down to the end of my street [I lived on the end] or something) before calling to see when they were going to come. Come to find, they had come days prior and never finished the job, leaving the box open and the work unfinished. I had to finish it myself.

All of these traditional telcos are garbage and their ratings in multiple arenas showcase that very clearly.

>Personally, I'm counting on TMO to kick Comcast's ass in my town.

Yeah... about that: https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-reiterates-...

Jan 2017, 10 months before the Layer3 acquisition. We'll see what happens.

5G would need to increase capacity by at least 2 orders of magnitude over 4G to compete with wireline service. That's not going happen, radio spectrum is a finite resource.

That's a really good point!

I'm curious as to how expensive implementation will be for municipal providers.

Muni/coop internet providers? Should be low if they can keep lease costs down for 5G base stations colocating with existing muni real estate, and use existing fiber for backhaul (or new fiber laid as part of Dig Once guidelines).

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