4G offers enough speed to replace my home internet connection, however aggregate bandwidth at the cell towers prevented this.
I assume with 5G we're just about at the point where you could ditch the home internet connection and go 100% cellular.
I assume with 5G we're just about at the point where you could ditch the home internet connection and go 100% cellular.
The two reasons I still have dedicated home internet at this point are data caps and latency (gaming). Otherwise, my phone usually gets comparable - or better! - speeds than my home connection.
Microsoft's One Drive was doing a constant upload/download one week, refreshing itself constantly, costing me $200. Ugh.
Historically, I think the fear among people like those here was more or less two-fold.
1.) The original top 1% downloaders were mostly those downloading lots of "Linux distributions" (and of course many other types of media) over torrents. I'm sure quite a few of those 1% ers were on sites like this and preferred to effectively be subsidized by the 99%.
2.) Whether or not it was just a rationalization for #1, many made the argument that bandwidth caps would constrain innovative services because if you turn a meter on, people are going to use bandwidth-intensive services a lot less and the Internet will be less generally useful as a result.
The dynamics today are probably a lot different. I imagine the profile of a big home bandwidth consumer now is a family that watches a lot of Netflix and YouTube.
And I hate Comcast. The $50/mo to unlock true unlimited internet was absurd.
I actually cancelled my Comcast last month and went to Century Link. The overall speed is slower, the lack of data cap and being 1/3 of the price has been worth it.
It feels good to no longer be giving them any money, especially after their billing would routinely "forget" discounts that were supposed to be on my account. I got offered free Starz for 3 months and $30 off my bill for the coming year, which just happened to only be there for a month... So after calling them to have the issue fixed once, and then seeing it happen again the very next month, I finally cut ties.
At least where I live, T-mobile towers are at least occasionally congested. Its not too uncommon for data to be slow or even non-functional with good signal levels (on my smartphone, don't know about this home product).
I am in Minneapolis and Century Link has managed to become the primary secondary option to Comcast. Some neighborhoods are lucky and have US Internet's Fiber as a third option.
On top of that, Century Link has been pushing hard to expand their fiber. I am relegated to only 40MB connection on the copper connection in my neighborhood right now, but the technician that came out to do the install said that (unofficially) they're hoping to have Century Link's fiber be an option in the next year.
$45/mo for 40MB. Will be $65/mo for fiber. Still a fraction of Comcast's insane rates.
With 5G and recent increase in cell tower coverage. We are almost there.
The only result of 5G would be the end of public wifi which typically has 5 - 10 mbps speeds.
Not if they charge anything close to what they charge now.