I prefer my fiber connection to a 5G connection. My fear is that they will do the math and find they can't compete (I don't know if this is actually the case). It could be the end of physical connections.
For 5G, home wireless is bottom of the line and gets de-prioritized behind phone customers.
The playbook is pretty obvious based on Verizon’s behavior. They’ve halted most fiber deployments in urban areas in favor of mm-wave 5G. The FCC declared mm-wave a national defense priority and it is not subject to any local regulation.
Spectrum and Comcast suck, but they are the lesser evil compared to telcos imo.
> The FCC declared mm-wave a national defense priority and it is not subject to any local regulation.
I am not sure where you are getting that but mm-wave is absolutely still regulated locally just like anything else. The main difference is the size of the radios for mm-wave are small and go on poles and the FCC did set a price ceiling on what utilities can charge for pole space. But there are also low and mid-band small cells that go on poles as well. But the wireless companies absolutely still have to get local permits to install any wireless system on poles or pretty much anything.
In my city they are placed in all sorts of bizarre locations that the zoning board would not approve such as, in the middle of lawns, within 8 feet of an existing pole owned by a competing utility, in the middle of a sidewalk, etc.
I doubt wireless carriers will ever be able to seriously compete with built out fiber in the long run. Once it is there, the costs have been paid and the provider is mainly just raking in residuals while keeping the lights on.
The flip side to that is the "many rural users are at the edges of existing coverage networks".
A 4G network can reach about 10 miles (16km) - a 5G network is about 1000 feet or 0.2 miles (about 300 meters).
Unless the providers are placing these on every other power pole, most rural users aren't likely to see 5G coverage. For what it's worth, my parents' house is about 0.1 miles from the road and 0.5 miles from the next nearest neighbor.
I believe that it is unlikely that wireless 5G will get out there (they don't have 4G service either - they're in a valley and use a femtocell for home phone use).
They don't have cable or fiber either and switched from a load balanced pair of DSL lines to Starlink.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/12/10/the-definitive-guide-to-5...
> One low band (600-700MHz) tower can cover hundreds of square miles with 5G service that ranges in speed from 30 to 250 megabits per second (Mbps).
Though... I'm still going to be skeptical with the "there are still some significant areas that lack 4g coverage"
https://fcc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=...
Look at the "how many areas only have one provider" or that you can see the topography and valleys in the coverage map.
but...
you will get less capacity, because at the lower frequencies there is less spectrum (it is simple arithmetic there is 1000Mhz of spectrum below 1Ghz, but there is 100Ghz of spectrum below 100Ghz (setting aside the details about how it gets allocated etc.)
The amount of capacity you can achieve is based on Shannon limit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theore...
it's the classic engineering trade off, better propagation vs. more capacity.
that is why the carriers want low, medium and high band in their inventory,
low is considered < 1Ghz, medium is considered 1Ghz - 10Ghz, high is > 10Ghz, roughly speaking
Its this type of poles that I'm more interested in - https://www.google.com/maps/@42.2639251,-89.787017,3a,75y,65...
Finally got T-Mobile Home Internet (5G). Shipped the access point overnight to me. Plugged in. 600Mbps peak. Never seen a slowdown that affects my heavyweight Net use (e.g. streaming HD).
The 5G home internet options can be good for people in older homes or neighborhoods or even rural area which have garbage internet.
This is good to hear, as that was my main concern. That the deployment of fiber would freeze in the state it was in 2020.