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Verizon: No 4G-Level Data Caps For 5G Home Service (pcmag.com)
Verizon recently announced that its upcoming 5G home internet service will not have the kinds of data limits you expect from current wireless services. It will reportedly be able to handle the average data load of a FiOS customer, and it won't be throttled down to 4G gigabyte caps. PC Magazine reports: Verizon has been trying out its new 5G home internet service for months. In a tour of its New Jersey lab, we got a closer look at the 5G antenna setup we saw at Mobile World Congress in February. It's a silver device the size of a paperback book, which connects to a Wi-Fi router with a display. You're supposed to put in a window facing Verizon's 5G service tower. In the test lab, engineer David Binczewski (below) showed us how the company is still working through the challenges of high-frequency, short-distance, millimeter-wave 5G -- most notably, how to penetrate various materials. In a chamber designed to test new 5G devices, he held up a piece of wood between a 5G emitter and a receiver, and we watched the signal fuzz out a bit on a nearby equipment screen. During a roundtable, VP of network support Mike Haberman, some other Verizon folks, and the assembled journalists agreed that an average data cap in the vicinity of 180GB/month would satisfy the average consumer. That's far more than Verizon's current 4G traffic management limit, where folks who use more than 22GB get sent to the back of the line if a tower is congested.
Yeah it's hard to come up with a single number that works well - that gives people what they want, but discourages reckless waste. As I mentioned, I probably use about 10GB and I work from home, over the internet. Intensive video uses bandwidth in a hurry, though.
180GB would cost $18 at 10 cents per GB. That would be cheap enough, perhaps, but still enough that people would turn off the TV (video stream) when they go to sleep or leave the house.
There's a lot of promises being made about 5G. Most of them are not just hype, but many will not be possible once the standard is in place, and some of the real world deployment scenarios are figured out.
I think the telcos are going to figure out how to get fixed mobile broadband working. There's too much to lose if they don't. They've fallen way behind on broadband access (except for areas where Verizon invested in FiOS) and the cable companies have taken a huge lead. T-Mobile specifically has so much to gain, because they don't have a current broadband presence.
It's likely that especially for rural areas, this will be a game changing moment. There will likely be three or four truly high speed options for internet in places that might not even have one today.
Internet demands are going to continue to grow. 30 Mbps in 2020 may feel like 5 Mbps today. Usable, but pokey. Unusable if you have multiple devices (or users). A typical "heavy usage" household in 2020 might have demands to stream 4K Netflix/Hulu on a TV (~15Mbps), concurrent with a 4K YouTube feed (user #2) (~15Mbps), and life streaming kind of appliances (think Amazon Echo Show on steroids). (~5 Mbps). If you're doing any kind of file syncing or web browsing concurrently (user #3), you're going to get squeezed out. By ~2022, I would not be surprised if the working definition of "high speed internet" is 100 Mbps. Is 5G going to deliver that? For everyone?
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Verizon: Meeting the needs of yesterday... tomorrow!
While a 180GB data cap *might* be reasonable today, I regularly exceed that with regular Netflix streaming.
A 4K stream uses around 7 - 10GB/hour, so 180GB means 18 hours of streaming/month, or around a half hour a day.
8K TV's are already available, and they'll use at least twice the bandwidth.
The speed is higher, the cap is higher. Whoopie.
It is interesting that they discuss caps that would be OK with an average home user today. They won't be OK with an average home user by the time this comes out. Therefore, they are already planning on a network capacity designed to justify caps and gouging. The basis for the whining we'll hear 5 years from now is already in place.