kevin_b_er 6 years ago

50GB cap. 300 Mbps. That's a 51200 MiB cap if we generously presume the GB is GiB and a speed of 37.5 MiB/sec. 22.7 minutes until your cap runs out.

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.

  • pwthornton 6 years ago

    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.

    • toomuchtodo 6 years ago

      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.

      • Nullabillity 6 years ago

        If they were able to dig for telephone and power then they can dig for fiber too.

        • tw04 6 years ago

          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!

          • pasbesoin 6 years ago

            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.

    • nbhuik 6 years ago

      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.

  • positr0n 6 years ago

    Where are you getting that figure from? A cap is not mentioned in the article and I couldn't find it in the FCC filing either.

  • Velchronus 6 years ago

    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.

  • kup0 6 years ago

    For sure. Caps will either make or break 5G-as-home-broadband

  • jtmcmc 6 years ago

    that's their current 4g phone cap.

dev_dull 6 years ago

Fits for many use cases but not all. Upload speeds and data caps mean there’s a very specific way you can use this type of internet.

I’m glad that this is actually starting to look like real competition. That’s ultimately what we need.

  • blacksmith_tb 6 years ago

    I haven't seen any claims for latency on 5G, but 4G LTE is just under 100ms, which is not what I'd call competitive with my 1ms fiber...

5580 6 years ago

This will be amazing. I used to install Verizon 4GLTE home devices and it could have been great without the horribly low caps on data usage.

If 5G allows for 500GB+ caps, then cable cutting might extend to internet cable cutting as well....

  • jrnichols 6 years ago

    I have the feeling they'll exempt their TV service from the data cap, which I've read elsewhere here would be 50gb.