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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

The key difference is that wireless is completely federally regulated, and the FCC doesn’t hold them to the same rules as wired providers. They don’t have the same net neutrality requirements and can and do rate limit based on a variety of factors.

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.

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Both wired and wireless are regulated by the FCC, neither have net neutrality restrictions anymore, the went bye bye in the U.S. at least, a couple years ago and I seriously doubt it will come back ever.

> 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.

The permitting process is essentially, apply for a permit, the city has 30 days to make aesthetic suggestions and cannot deny the permit.

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.

There is one silver lining: mmWave 5G has a much shorter range and therefore reduced light pollution compared with the spectrum of 4G. This is good collectively good for users of the network.

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