Latency and speed are slow, and some of the providers mess with/block certain traffic (IKEv2 etc).
Latency and speed are slow, and some of the providers mess with/block certain traffic (IKEv2 etc).
Most of the major FWA providers are mobile phone carriers, so both mobile and FWA customers actually use the same tower/spectrum/etc so the general increase in demand (especially from mobile given they can't stop selling new mobile servcies) sometimes results in a good service in Year 1 degrading to poorer service in subsquent years. However the carriers can easily resolve that by adding more 4G carriers, deploying 5G, and even building new cell sites (which kills two birds with one stone -- better coverage for mobile users and more capacity for FWA users).
When FWA first came out I confess that I thought it was a silly idea until my eldery mother accepted an incentive from her provider (cheaper monthly fee) if she moved onto FWA (from ADSL previously). She's zero complaints. And sure enough it works well for a low-end user -- emails, Facebook, WhatsApp, Netflix, YouTube, etc all work just as good on FWA as it does on fibre/DSL/Cable/etc. She happens to be close enough to the tower and that tower has also been upgraded and has heaps of 4G carriers so the service is consisently good.
YMMV but when done well, 4G/5G FWA is a great option for low-end users.
(Yes obviously latency is worse than fibre, I would probably hate it if I was still into FPS gaming etc., but in practice it's fine.)
(When I set it up it was better and cheaper than the copper options, fibre not available. Fibre or Starlink would now probably be better, but still each much more expensive, even ignoring one-time costs. I don't need it/not worth it. Idk about latency but I could certainly get more bandwidth out of one-time costs on LTE too.)
Most people on cellphones don't notice, but it becomes oh so noticeable when your interacting with it every day.
Also, I forgot which equipment they gave me, but it had terrible buffer bloat, and did some nasty nasty arp spoofing when I placed it on my network and made everything bad, and it wouldn't let me put it on XX.2.0/24 and have a static route for XX.0.0/24 so maybe I could keep it roughly contained. Maaaaybe I could have done something with VLANs, but I was done at that point. I'm still grumpy because it took 3 months and contacting the CEO email address to get the bill settled, but they did settle it. Not exactly a risk free trial in my book.
Speed and latency was good though, as long as you didn't hit bufferbloat. I don't remember exactly, but 500M+ down, 200M+ up, < 25 ms ping; CGNAT brought the speeds down to about 100M, but most CDNs are v6 capable now, and most people aren't that bothered by CGNAT. Obviously you and I and a lot of others here have reasons to want their own v4 address, but a lot of people in a lot of places can't get one on any home internet, so. Of course, speed and latency vary a lot by your reception, but I live on a heavily forested and very hilly island; I am at a high point, but surrounded by trees so eh?
What service have you tried that didn't work well for you?
Don't get me wrong, I'd much rather have a wired connection. But if my isp can't even be bothered to give me a functional connection more than 90% of the time...