"But," you may ask, "why would industry groups ever push something like that? Such a thing would cost loads of money and put market dominance at risk!"
And then maybe you start to wonder why they're in such a rush to fight for the subsidies, investment, and contracts for "more wireless, but faster and more G's!"
I mean this is pretty much exactly why the government shouldn’t be in charge of deciding how to allocate this investment.
Fiber is far less useful than fast wireless. 60% of Maryland has access to fiber. It hasn’t been revolutionary in the least. Most people don’t even subscribe to it, even in high income suburbs. Meanwhile, over 15% of high income households are “mobile only.”
I think it’s fair to say that if you are computing using a tablet, you’re probably not benefitting much from fiber. Well, global PC sales peaked in 2010: https://images.app.goo.gl/4jwgmheZhp1S39EZ6. Desktop PC sales globally are about the same as they were in 2001. The percentage of people using a computing device that can take advantage of fiber continues to shrink.
The vast majority of my personal (ie: not at work) computing is done at home. Whether I'm using my desktop workstation (wired), my laptop (either wired or wifi), or a tablet/phone (wifi), I would benefit if the WAN connection serving my home network offered gigabit speeds.
At work I already have fiber-level speeds. I don't need my phone to stream music faster in the car or pull up search results faster when I'm out at the store. LTE is more than sufficient for that stuff and I can buy a reasonable allotment of data (5GB) for $30 each month. At home I don't want my local network's connection to the outside world depending on signal strength, data caps, or the whims of cell-service-style billing practices.
And I don't care about TV packages or any of that. Between OTA (free), Netflix ($150/yr) Prime Video (included with $120/yr Amazon Prime), and whatever free stuff is on YouTube, PlutoTV, and news sites, I have plenty of stuff to look at when I feel like being a lump on the couch.
At least here in Maryland, its not cost that limits the uptake here, it’s usefulness. Cable broadband here is very fast. Comcast charges more for 1000/35 cable than Verizon charges for 1000/1000 fiber, even in neighborhoods that have access to both (which is most of the state outside Baltimore and very rural areas). People just don’t value the extra upload speeds that highly compared to Comcast’s better TV packages.
Average tends to be skewed to America's favour because of an extremely rich top 5% or so. Median is closer to each other but also seems to favor the US. But then do you account for the fact that Americans work longer hours? Or not? In my country the average workweek is 29 hours. In the US it's 38 I think. And most Western EU countries are in between these two. And European also have more paid leave on average.
And you can also use disposable income, which is what you can actually spend, so seems like a fair comparison. Then the US wins again, but on the other hand Americans also have to use this income for stuff like out of pocket healthcare costs, education costs, emergency-unemployment fund etc, where in Europe these things are mostly covered by taxes. But that means your disposable income is lower.
But on the other hand buying stuff is usually more expensive in EU because of the VAT system.
I don't think base station backhaul and FTTH are comparable investments.
In a denser urban residential setting, mmWave certainly won't have enough penetration to provide solid service to high-rise apartments, and it's even less likely that sub-6GHz 5G will have enough aggregate capacity to kill off wired ISPs.
mmWave simply isn't viable for residential/fixed usage, and sub-6 is only an incremental improvement that brings cellular performance up to WiFi speeds, but not beyond.
This is far off base. Conservatively, a mmwave base station has a range of about 1,500 feet, covering about 7 million square feet, or 160 acres. Median subdivision density is about 2 houses per acre: https://www.nahbclassic.org/generic.aspx?sectionID=734&gener.... So one base station can cover 300 houses. For comparison, an N+0 cable node (a node where the fiber is close enough to the houses to require no amplifiers on the coax side) is 50-130 houses. Cable companies have been running N+0 nodes all over the place, but have been hesitant to build the fiber all the way to the premises. That should tell you a lot about how expensive that next increment is.
At what speed? If that's just the range at which it stops being an upgrade over current LTE speeds, that's really unimpressive. The figure of interest here is the range at which mmWave can reliably sustain WiFi-like performance, including enough aggregate capacity for gaming to still have low latency when all your neighbors and one or two of your family members are streaming video.
> That should tell you a lot about how expensive that next increment is.
Not really. Cable companies are upgrading their networks by replacing some of the coax in the ground with fiber, as necessary to get enough backhaul bandwidth to each node. The incentives there are wildly different than for a new ISP that's either deploying FTTH or short-range cellular, without having access to pre-existing last mile wiring that has no trouble carrying gigabit to each customer. For wired infrastructure, digging the trenches is a lot more expensive than the materials cost for whatever you're putting in the trenches.
As to your second point, the whole point of wireless is you avoid the need to dig trenches. Getting the last 500 feet through a subdivision is a huge pain in the ass. I had Comcast install fiber to my house a couple of years ago. It took the contractors half a day to run fiber 1,700 feet on the pole down the main road, another half a day to run it 300 feet to the pole outside my house, and another half day to run it 30 feet under my driveway. With 5G they could’ve stopped after the first step and served the whole subdivision (200 houses).
PS. If I'm wrong, please let me know. I'd love to hear about any developments in long range P2P wireless phones.
Turns out, even those bands do have a lot of limitations. For example you cannot use any encryption, which makes most of the modern tools out of the picture because TLS is impossible. There are some workarounds like doing TLS with blank keys, but far as I understand it is dicey so far as legality goes. (The data on Aether is public, but we use encryption tools for authentication of messages.)
Most cell phones already have Wifi, we would need a mesh (or at least special ad-hoc) standard for this and there you have your walkie talkie functionality with a bit of software.
There has been little success pushing one of those as apparently nobody cares about this feature.
If there were a way to whitelist authenticated phones of my friends, that could work.
And if you and your ilk load some kind of meshing or 'router app' on these advanced (non-hobbled) handheld radios, you might have a better chance of getting in touch with that out of range person by routing packets across radios until you're at the internet. Even if you limit the bandwidth to text messages for this feature, it could be a real lifesaver for folks needing to get emergency messages out.
Just think if governments made decisions based on evidence, trials and what was best for the populace, not which industry backed lobby shouted loudest and hired the most politicians' friends.