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Comment by danimal88 | Hacker News Reader

Its definitely a monopoly but I think this as much derives from the redundancy of running multiple cables/fibers/etc. hence a lot of these are natural monopolies. It's why utilities are handled the way they are as well. Similar concept applies to roads hence why roads are usually publicly owned. Having competing roads wouldn't really make that much sense...

All that said, I'm hoping wireless solutions change this scenario. Effectively, if I can run a 5G (or w/e) hotspot connected to my router, the latency/throughput is good enough, I'm pretty much cool ditching my wired options. A monopoly on the wireless side is still possible (spectrum can be a limiting reagent), but I think it's much less likely to devolve into our current ISP dynamic. I'm certain there are plenty of technical issues with going all wireless but it doesn't seem insurmountable.

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A 5g tower is like a WiFi hotspot with maybe 2-3x the range. Any factors that apply to traditional home internet will apply to 5g as well because it needs the same internet access as your home WiFi hotspot.

This is not the case for 4g since the much lower frequencies (with much lower data rates) go much further meaning that the given last mile monopoly in an area has less of an effect on the 4g service.

If a cell phone carrier builds all of its own infrastructure to supply bandwidth to 5g towers, they are subject to all the same difficulties and delays as existing ISPs. This means that build out of 5g as fast as home internet will take decades and many areas will have only one or two options (same as the situation is with home internet).

The waters are muddied by the fact that carriers use “5g” to refer to what will be a wide range of service levels, but right now are only hyping the fastest possible imagined deployments.

> A 5g tower is like a WiFi hotspot with maybe 2-3x the range. Any factors that apply to traditional home internet will apply to 5g as well because it needs the same internet access as your home WiFi hotspot.

It’s more than that, but even there you’re talking about covering 9 houses for the cost of wiring up one. The fan-out math kills you for FTTH.

Everything I've read about 5g makes it sound stupid, why are we even doing this?

My fear with fixed link wireless broadband is that it won’t be “real” internet in the sense of a publically accessible IP.

In the case of regular cellular service, is the IP publically accessible, or is it behind a NAT of some sort? I always assumed that it was behind a NAT for some reason, but I don’t know for sure.

I like to be able to host my own services for personal use.

Wouldn't tunnelling of some sort be an answer here? The percentage of people who want to run their own IP-accessible services is pretty low after all. Tunneling to some kind of proxy service isn't ideal, but it would fulfill most needs.

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