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Comment by julianozen | Hacker News Reader

I think perhaps being able to replace cable is the biggest benefit. This will force prices down in certain markets and allow consumers to choose between more consumer friendly companies then comcast

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This is more blurb ... you’re never going to beat wired. Simple physics. You can come up with more and more efficient ways to use spectrum but you’re always going to saturate the commons at some stage. With hard wires you can have as many spectrums to share out as you have wires .. running side by side if you like.

It's true that wired will always be faster than wireless, all things equal. But if you live in an area where there is a monopoly on wired internet, you would welcome competition from wireless players.

In the town where I live, in a very nice part of Silicon Valley, Comcast is the only option. Their pricing isn't horrendous if you hound them for discounts (I pay $30/mo for 20Mb service), but I'm sure their pricing would be better if they had more competition.

This is a policy problem as much as a technical one, and really spectrum is managed and licensed in much the same way so there's not much reason to believe you won’t get screwed that way too ...

Right. So why dish out spectrum and public space for cells to the same players without fixing the existing issues?

So yes, 5G will be slower then a wired but it will be much much cheaper to cover wider swaths of area because 5G doesnt need to dig up the ground to every house to install. For places where it is very difficult for broadband to reach, 5G speeds can be a suitable option.

At the very least, threats from telecom companies will force Comcast to compete

But 5G also has less range, and the tower doodads still require some flavor of backbone to be able to dish out internet. Generally that backbone is a wired connection, be that copper or fiber.

Competition for ISPs is definitely welcome (even if it's from the darn big telcos). I'm open to this idea even though it'll probably be worse latency.

> I think perhaps being able to replace cable is the biggest benefit.

At a comparable cost? I don't think this is going to happen for a whole lot of reasons, including that a whole ton of infrastructure has to be built to support that use case (such as fiber running to all those cell base stations).

I think that it will be possible, but it's going to be very, very expensive for at least a few years, and then the price will fall to approximately what you pay for cable now.

I don't see the customer experience being any better (in the US, anyway) because the companies supplying 5G will be the telecoms, and their history of being "customer friendly" is already very well-known.

The price of cable is primarily based on # of competitors in the market, and the income of the neighborhood. Moving from SF to Oakland dropped my bill in half.

Verizon/ATT/etc are certainly not my favorite companies, but if they could potentially expand their customer based by offering home internet over 5G, they would operate very differently to try and gain marketshare (plus Comcast would need to respond).

Cable? As in....TV? At a risk of sounding dismissive - won't TV be dead by then? I'm 29 and I literally don't know anyone who watches actual live TV anymore. Well, no, that's not true, my grandparents do. But even my mum and my wife's parents have already switched to netflix-only situation, regular TV is just so full of ads and nonsense that it doesn't make any sense to pay for it.

I think the parent comment was referring to hard-line internet, i.e. fiber and coax ("cable").

I like TV because it tells me what to watch. I don’t have to choose. I think other people derive a lot of value from this as well. I don’t have TV but I’m at a hotel right now and watching TV while drinking beer (and typing this I guess) is pretty damn nice. It’s possible that feeling would wear off if I had it around regularly, though.

But I bet TV will still be a major thing, say, 30 years in the future. Right now 75% of households in the US pay for TV, so I think your comment is a little overblown.

> It’s possible that feeling would wear off if I had it around regularly, though.

Over Christmas/New Years I was at my parents place, and they have DirectTV. The first few days were nice. After that I realized I was just watching for the sake of watching just to see what came on next, and it was all reruns of stuff I've already seen.

I am a big fan of curation, but I much prefer the curation of seeing what the programmers put on in prime time and then watching it on demand, or Netflix's recommendations.

I only watch TV for sporting events. In my area, there’s currently a legal battle going on between the “regional sports network” that has negotiated broadcasting rights with certain major teams and Comcast, to whom the RSN sells the programming. Comcast declined to renew their contract, so games played by those teams are blacked out for Comcast customers. The RSN is arguing that Comcast has a monopsony on the purchase of programming from RSNs, and that their goal is to replace them with a subsidiary of their own. The original complaint and Comcast’s quick motion to dismiss show, if nothing else, that the RSN is legally out-gunned. It’s possible that 5G could provide an economically viable alternative distribution method—i.e., “over the top”—for the RSN.

If their target demographic all have Comcast internet, couldn't this RSN just start an internet streaming service and stream their content to those same customers without Comcast taking a cut?

If for some reason they couldn't do that, why would 5G change anything?

Since you used the word "mum," I'll assume that you're British. In which case, 67 million Britons disagree with you†: https://www.barb.co.uk/tv-landscape-reports/tracker-uk-house...

Perhaps you should meet more people?

(† There aren't 67 million Britons. But TV viewership in the UK is 28.1 million households, and the average household in the UK is 2.4 people, so we end up with an impossible number.)

BARB is talking about a potential audience. In my building, for example, it would consider that there are 12 households with Terrestrial TV as potential audience. There's an aerial on the roof, and in 2018 when I last checked, the routine job to fetch the TV listings out of the data stream was still working on a PC I had connected to the aerial socket. That job may still be working but I haven't checked - like most people in this building, and your comment's parent, I don't actually watch live TV so I don't need the listings data any more if it's still being collected.

So that's 12 households you're counting as "TV viewership" that don't watch live TV. They could watch any hypothetical TV show or advertisement, but they in fact will not. They would not disagree with your parent poster.

My mother (retired) is the only person I know who watches live TV. My Facebook is full of people chatting about TV shows (Sabrina, Doctor Who, etc.) but none of them watch it live. Some of them have paid subscriptions to various sources of TV, and many of the same people also have "pirate" hookups to get TV that isn't available in a timely fashion, as described many times they aren't unwilling to pay they're unwilling to be inconvenienced.

I use streaming services in combination with over the air TV. After cleaning out the foreign language channels, sales networks and religious channels I have 40 quality stations worth watching. I certainly agree that paying to watch commercials is insane and cable TV originally didn’t have commercials to move people over from antennas.

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