I don't get why this is a good use for a lot of home broadband users? If you can get fiber in the ground to a house, why would you want 5G at home? Caps are going to be an issue with 5G.
I understand that some places are too expensive to run fiber to homes, but for a lot of Americans, for instance, they really should have fiber being run to their homes.
Most Americans won't have fiber to the premises unless a local muni provider rolls it out. It's very expensive, and most incumbent ILECs gave up on it (See: Verizon->Frontier). "Should" is dependent on cost recovery of trenching, labor, and equipment costs.
Of course they CAN, but what is the motivation? They have no competition and the government doesn't seem to have any interest in finding ways to motivate them. Their cost of bandwidth continues to drop as they continue to increase prices and introduce artificial caps. They're printing money!
In many cases, people -- the public -- need to stop thinking of Company X's purpose as "providing Y service".
The focus has really become first and foremost upon "making money". Private profit.
The service becomes, if not incidental, then certainly secondary to this.
Consumer and small business Gigabit Internet in the U.S. was a rare oddity, until Google launched its Fibre initiative.
And for Google, this was to move customer engagement and so ads -- their moneymakers. (And neutralizing competitors' barriers to same.) As the Google idealism continued to be actively suffocated, it was not about Fibre, it was about making money.
Across the ISP industry, fiber deployments have been stalling, where they've not outright been declared dormant if not dead. This has been -- to me, at least -- rather observable in the past few to several years.
What's been happening? Companies have been building and building up to cellular radio enhancements, serving simultaneously mobile users but also -- with a single technology and deployment, and one that has also been exempted from "net neutrality" and also somewhat excused from having to explain its "data caps" -- traditional fixed installations.
At the same time, telecommunications companies have been severely neglecting their "legacy" copper line services.
They have decided to move to cellular radio, for all this, and to convince regulators and other public authorities that these deployments meet, or should be allowed to be redefined to "meet", all of their outstanding obligations -- which remain substantial and were granted in return for the monopolies granted to them that have continued to benefit them for so long.
Cellular deployment's cheaper. Especially when you are not required to provide the same / equivalent level of service and capacity. When you have greater authority to manipulate the service and delivery to your own benefit.
And when you exist in an oligopoly and have no fundamental, substantive competition...
You provide enough to avoid losing your position. And the rest is pure profit.
You're making money. The "service" is just a means to that end -- one you make "just good enough" to avoid cutting into said profit.
A lot of people don't use the Internet that much. $50-$100 is expensive for receiving e-mail, looking at news and some videos. Fiber deployment might very well stall in a lot of countries because of this.
Caps are essentially necessary in mobile wireless as a means of resource management; but, in the low density areas where fixed wireless 5g is a good option, there may be no need for caps in the first place.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 40.2 ms ] threadIf 5G allows for 500GB+ caps, then cable cutting might extend to internet cable cutting as well....
All these higher speeds on heavily throttled and capped networks just means that you hit your throttle or pay-per-MB cap that much faster.
I understand that some places are too expensive to run fiber to homes, but for a lot of Americans, for instance, they really should have fiber being run to their homes.
The focus has really become first and foremost upon "making money". Private profit.
The service becomes, if not incidental, then certainly secondary to this.
Consumer and small business Gigabit Internet in the U.S. was a rare oddity, until Google launched its Fibre initiative.
And for Google, this was to move customer engagement and so ads -- their moneymakers. (And neutralizing competitors' barriers to same.) As the Google idealism continued to be actively suffocated, it was not about Fibre, it was about making money.
Across the ISP industry, fiber deployments have been stalling, where they've not outright been declared dormant if not dead. This has been -- to me, at least -- rather observable in the past few to several years.
What's been happening? Companies have been building and building up to cellular radio enhancements, serving simultaneously mobile users but also -- with a single technology and deployment, and one that has also been exempted from "net neutrality" and also somewhat excused from having to explain its "data caps" -- traditional fixed installations.
At the same time, telecommunications companies have been severely neglecting their "legacy" copper line services.
They have decided to move to cellular radio, for all this, and to convince regulators and other public authorities that these deployments meet, or should be allowed to be redefined to "meet", all of their outstanding obligations -- which remain substantial and were granted in return for the monopolies granted to them that have continued to benefit them for so long.
Cellular deployment's cheaper. Especially when you are not required to provide the same / equivalent level of service and capacity. When you have greater authority to manipulate the service and delivery to your own benefit.
And when you exist in an oligopoly and have no fundamental, substantive competition...
You provide enough to avoid losing your position. And the rest is pure profit.
You're making money. The "service" is just a means to that end -- one you make "just good enough" to avoid cutting into said profit.
I’m glad that this is actually starting to look like real competition. That’s ultimately what we need.