I thought the killer app would be to replace at home wired broadband with 5G wireless. I still think it looks compelling.
For example, my inlaws live in semi-rural South Carolina and a new cell tower was built about a mile away from their home ~2 years ago. T-Mobile's Home Internet product indicates there's no service at their address for even though I have what looks to be full signal strength indoors on their "5G UC" network (indicates mid-band & mmWave from what I can tell, but in this location it's likely just mid-band). Every speed test I've executed from my T-Mobile-connected phone (Galaxy S22) is in the 600-700Mbps range and it doesn't vary based on the time of day.
Verizon Wireless indicates that they're not in the service area either for their 5G home Internet product, although I don't have data points from any UE on their network in that area.
However, I pay about 25 eur for my 5G telco (unlimited data), and 35 eur for my fiber connection (100mbit/100mbit). My telco allows dual SIM usage, so I am thinking about just cancelling my fiber connection and installing a 5G modem. The thing that is holding me back is that a good 5G modem is somewhere between 500 and 4000 eur, so it is quite an expensive experiment to do.
I was in Korea for work and it seemed the same there, I was even in eastern Europe visiting family and it was a pretty similar story. So I figured it was pretty universal. Although I know that Australia isn't in a good space with broadband simply because of politics and companies not wanting to work together, I'd assumed they were an outlier
we have fibre to about 90% of the population
Real Question: On paper, NBN is an insane human development achievement. Why do so many non-urban Ozzies on HN complain about lousy Internet access? Honestly, I don't believe it. Send them to Germany for a year, and they will see how bad it can be. (HN is full of funny stories from Germans about how bad is their broadband.)