I thought this, too, but it seems carriers in the USA are being /very/ selective about where they offer the service.
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.
Trouble is, as far as I can tell, at 5G frequencies you need micro stations all over the place. If your suburban street has 10 houses and needs 5 stations (with fiber runs to each) to offer mmWave to everyone, it’s basically just the same thing as home broadband yet more expensive.
Nope. There was a company about 20 years ago called WinStar that tried this. The reason it’s not “basically the same” is called “the last mile” problem.
It’s vastly cheaper to install things on every block even than to every house especially when the utility poles and right of ways are already there.
In something of a paradoxical curse, operating on 4G frequencies mean you share spectrum with a much larger land area, limiting possible bandwidth. You aren’t going to serve 1gbps of home internet to every house in reach.
Where I live we have decent fiber penetration. In my appartment I can have a 1Gb/1Gb internet connection no problem.
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.
Outside cities, the network situation is pretty bad. I am in an affluent suburb and my only option is 4mb/200k. No that is not a typo. Broadband coverage is still pretty spotty in the usa.
Wow, we have fibre to about 90% of the population and ripped out copper a few years ago. In rural areas there is government subsidised 4g internet and in the most rural it's government subsidised satellite.
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
Australia? NBN (National Broadband Network) is the only one I can think of...
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.)
