A 5G day may come when the courage of cable and DSL fails ... but it is not this day

Re: Dead birds?

There will always be crazies claiming their ailment or pet cause is affected by a new technology. 5G doesn't use higher power levels than LTE, and the new frequencies that are being opened up are mostly those being used for satellite uplinks for C band and Ka band - which operate at much higher power levels than cellular towers.

So if "5G" caused bird deaths, there would be giant piles of dead birds around every satellite uplink facility!

Did you actually read the article?

The other thing 5G-FWA has is cost. It's much cheaper and easier to deploy and that's a saving that can be passed on to a household almost immediately

> If this costs more than a fixed line internet then they can, as far as I am concerned, forget it.

Given that the article mentions:

For example, there's no need for £240-a-year line rental. Overall Ovum estimates it's almost 50 per cent cheaper to deploy.

One would expect it to be roughly on a par with current fixed line costs (once everything settles down, at least - early adopters liable to be gouged). For example, swapping your current land line for a £20/mo LTE contract can currently get you a usage of 20GB/mo with EE, or even up to 100GB with Three. So get a SIM only contract and a SIM enabled router, preferably one that will take an external antenna. If you live in a decently covered area (YMMV), then you can already lose the BT copper connection.

Three SIM

Pay Monthly "contract" (i.e. month to month but there are 12/18/24 month options available to make it cheaper).

4G.

30Gb / month, not counting TVPlayer and Netflix traffic.

30Mbps or thereabouts in peak times.

Vodafone do similar - 40Gb, available for £35 a month with a pass to let all kinds of junk that don't count towards your data limit (YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, Netflix, etc.).

EE do up to 100's of GB but they get expensive.

If you wanted to do it now, today, then it's a £50 Wifi 4G router (tiny little box), a £22 a month contract or £30 if you don't want to be tied in.

Just an aside - I have had that for at least a year as my only Internet connection because BT etc. generally charge at least £19 a month line rental on top of the broadband prices, so it's cheaper to 4G, and I have no choice for other providers in my area.

5G being even cheaper - more than possible.

Try a quick google search for "Mobile Broadband SIM" before you start throwing around assertions.

Cost

While the article may say

"It's much cheaper and easier to deploy and that's a saving that can be passed on to a household almost immediately. For example, there's no need for £240-a-year line rental"

I personally just read that as,

"it costs us less to deploy, but because it is 'faster' we can charge even more for it, so double profit for us. yay."

Re: Cityfolk

Basically, you want to live in my house, in a fairly low-density suburb of a large town, with a line-of sight view of the phone mast about 30 meters away. My 4G is the same speed as my ADSL.

Cable options are not so good though.

I give you MBNL. There's also an agreement between Vodafone and O2/Telefonica, but that looks to be in renegotiation in London due to 5G trials.

True, it's not your nirvana of "one infrastructure network to rule them all", but it's something.

"We're going to be sitting on a huge amount of spare capacity on which the incremental cost is extremely low," says Three CEO David Dyson recently.

Translation: "5G is going to cost us a ton of money which our existing customers won't cover, so we're desperately hunting for other ways to sell it"

Or like BT Openreach. I'm not sure that's a good idea.

Re: Points to consider

I see 5 bars of 4g when I'm out and about but it can still take minutes to download a page of Google map because I'm sharing the bandwidth with so many other users. Will this 5g be different? Does it restrict the number of users so they can all achieve decent bandwidth, or will I still be lost because the bloke at the next table is watching Netflix?

Re: Points to consider

Don't worry about bandwidth. The MNOs will handle that by making cells smaller and having many more base stations. Like one per house :).

Also to remember is why this whole idea came up in the first place; the lack of a high speed network out to customers. So who is going to provide the high speed back haul network required to service the myriad of 5G base stations?. In the rush to push Mobile as "Good", Fixed is "Bad" most evangelists forget that most of a mobile network is fixed land based transmission and switching. Only the last few hundred metres is radio.

Re: Points to consider

"* Indoor coverage is getting more important. The problem is that the carriers don't see that as their problem and expect you to pay for your own indoor solution."

Not to mention that many new builds using new insulation products often means insulation panals with a layer of tinfoil on them. I'd imagine that would be like living in a Faraday cage.

Re: 46.2Mbps fiber?

Fibre = VDSL in the UK because OFCOM are pathetic and let it slide.

VDSL = ADSL + some knobs on. Max is about 75Mbps in general.

VDSL2 gets up to 200-300Mbps.

I game over 4G.

It's fine. 30-50ms usually. Of course it spikes, but then if you game over wireless you're getting bigger spikes all the time and I bet you didn't notice those (seriously... run a constant "ping -t" to your wireless router IP in the background, go and play a game, come back and I bet it's not "1ms" constantly as it would be on a wired connection).

5G will lower it further but it's already more viable than most people's broadband.

(P.S. I run game servers, and everyone always used to moan about how low my ping was "because it's in his back room"... er... no... my servers were in France, I was in the UK... I just don't have junky wireless, I QoS my gaming packets, I have a good, well-managed connection, and other users even on my local network blasting the connection into oblivion don't get to stomp over my gaming ping... I was going through an ordinary ISP, to a foreign server, same as everyone else, and getting sub-10/sub-20 pings all the time. So, trust me, I'd notice if 4G pings were atrocious, because that's all I have nowadays.).