> Transmitting high-end 4K video today requires 15 Mb/s, according to Netflix. Home broadband upgrades from, say, hundreds of Mb/s to 1,000 Mb/s (or 1 Gb/s) typically make little to no noticeable difference for the average end user.
What I find fascinating is that in a lot of situations mobile phones are now way faster than wired internet for lots of people. My parents never upgraded their home internet despite there being fire available. They have 80MBit via DSL. Their phones however due to regular upgrades now have unlimited 5G and are almost 10 times as fast as their home internet.
> Transmitting high-end 4K video today requires 15 Mb/s, according to Netflix.
It doesn't really change their argument, but to be fair, Netflix has some of the lowest picture quality of any major streaming service on the market, their version of "high-end 4K" is so heavily compressed, it routinely looks worse than a 15 year old 1080p Blu-Ray.
"High-end" 4K video (assuming HEVC) should really be targeting 30 Mb/s average, with peaks up to 50 Mb/s. Not "15 Mb/s".
Yes, you've nailed exactly why it's frustrating. They still could have written his piece almost as is, even including the napkin-math extrapolations for future tech, and it would have carried a little more weight.
On one hand it's nice that the option for that fast wireless connection is available. But on the other hand it sucks that having it means the motivation for ISPs to run fiber to homes in sparse towns goes from low down to none, since they can just point people to the wireless options. Wireless doesn't beat the reliability, latency, and consistent speeds of a fiber connection.
It's not that mobile is fast, it's that home internet is slow. It's the same reason home internet in places like Africa, South Korea and Eastern Europe is faster than in the USA and Western Europe: home internet was built out on old technology (cable/DSL) and never upgraded because (cynically) incumbent monopolies won't allow it or (less cynically) governments don't want to pay to rip up all the roads again.
Several Western European countries have deployed XGS-PON at scale, offering up to 10 Gbps, peaking at ~8 Gbps in practice. Hell I even have access to 25 Gbps P2P fiber here in Switzerland.
Also you can deliver well over 1 Gbps over coax or DSL with modern DOCSIS and G.fast respectively. But most countries have started dismantling copper wirelines.
Very few people have home equipment that can do anything close to 10Gbps, of course; this is all largely future proofing.
Years back, when FTTH started rolling out in Ireland, some of the CPE for the earliest rollouts only had 100Mbit/sec ethernet (on a 1Gbit/sec service)...
The reliability is definitely a bigger question, jitter a bit more questionable, but as far as latency goes 5G fixed wireless can be just fine. YMMV, but on a lot of spots around my town it's pretty comparable latency/jitter-wise as my home fiber connection to similar hosts. And connecting home is often <5ms throughout the city.
I was considering my cell phone and hotspot experiences (not 5G fixed wireless.) I suppose that has some amount of prioritization happening in order to provide a "stable" experience. My experiences with LTE/5G/5GUW have varied wildly based on location and time.
Fixed wireless sometimes operates on dedicated channels and priorities.
My experiences on portable devices have also seen some mixture of performance, but I'm also on a super cheap MVNO plan. Friends on more premium plans often get far more consistent experiences.
5G can be extremely fast. I get 600 MBit over cellular at home.
Is your T-Mobile underprovisioned? Where I am, T-Mobile 5G is 400Mbps at 2am, but slows to 5-10Mbps on weekdays at lunchtime and during rush hours, and on weekends when the bars are full.
Not to mention that the T-Mobile Home Internet router either locks up, or reboots itself at least twice a day.
I put up with the inconvenience because it's either $55 to T-Mobile, $100 to Verizon for even less 5G bandwidth, or $140 the local cable company.
Probably. My area used to be a T-Mobile dead zone 5 years ago.
I also have Verizon.
Choice of service varies based on location heavily from my experience. I’m a long time big time camper and I’ve driven through most corners of most Western states:
- 1/3 will have NO cellular service
- 1/3 will have ONLY Verizon. If T-Mobile comes up, it’s unusable
- 1/3 remaining will have both T-Mobile and Verizon
My Verizon is speed capped so I can’t compare that. T-Mobile works better in more urban areas for me, but it’s unpredictable. In a medium sized costal town in Oregon, Verizon might be better but I will then get half gigabit T-Mobile in a different coastal town in California.
One thing I have learned is that those coverage maps are quite accurate.
They're constantly running promotions "get free smartglases/video game systems/etc if you sign up for gigabit." Turns out that gigabit is still way more than most people need, even if it's 2025 and you spend hours per day online.
What I find fascinating is that in a lot of situations mobile phones are now way faster than wired internet for lots of people. My parents never upgraded their home internet despite there being fire available. They have 80MBit via DSL. Their phones however due to regular upgrades now have unlimited 5G and are almost 10 times as fast as their home internet.