Verizon Will Launch 5G Home Internet Access In 2018 (engadget.com)

wyattstorch516 writes: Real competition may finally be on the way for the residential broadband market. Verizon will be the first company to introduce 5G wireless broadband in a select number of cities. This will give residential customers an alternative to cable/fiber offerings. 5G wireless can offer speeds in the range of hundreds of megabits per second. Full technical specifications as well as pricing plans have yet to be determined. The launch is scheduled for the second half of 2018.

Comments

Latency and Monthly Bandwidth

[corychristison]

This will depend on monthly bandwidth allotments, and, to a lesser extent, latency.

If you can't pull down 500GB a month at a reasonable cost, there will be no competition. End of story.

Re:Latency and Monthly Bandwidth

[Darinbob]

It will be like cable. Lots of bandwidth at the start, user is very happy. Later everyone uses it, more and more of the fixed bandwidth gets used by the neighbors, original user is pissed that performance has gone down.

Re:Latency and Monthly Bandwidth

[leonbev]

He's right, you know... Verizon's 4G LTE network was pretty awesome early on, until Apple released an iPhone with an LTE radio and the network slowed down for awhile due to all of the extra traffic. I think that was around the same time they started killing off the grandfathered $30 a month unlimited data plans as well.

I'd imagine that the first handful of 5G home subscribers will have a similar experience until 5G smartphones become popular. Then they will probably start cutting data plans for people "abusing" the system by downloading 300+ GB of a data a month from 4K Netflix streaming and a few game downloads.

Re:Latency and Monthly Bandwidth

[mysidia]

first handful of 5G home subscribers will have a similar experience until 5G smartphones become popular.

So in exchange for being fixed endpoints and not allowed to move; give the 5G home users priority on the network and apply all the restrictions and throttling to the actual smartphones. Because of the additional capacity 5G provides it should be fine providing they build out their networks adequately.

Great.

[ScentCone]

But it's not cities where this is needed. It's the places outside the cities where there's no high speed access of any kind, and never will be if it involves pulling cable/fiber down winding roads in less densely populated areas.

It's not competition..

[Z80a]

If it's verizon offering it.
Wake me up when another company like google is allowed to even try.

Wat

[XSportSeeker]

"Verizon Will Launch" "Real competition"
Does not compute

I'm not sure about the Verizon flavor but

[nehumanuscrede]

I believe the AT&T flavor of this is going to run somewhere in the 30ghz band ?

I -think- DirecTv works in the 18ghz band and anyone who has ever tried to watch the damn thing
during a rainstorm can see where my next question is going . . . . .

I am curious how well this technology is going to work when the weather decides not to play nice.
( Rain, fog, snow, etc )

Can one of you radio types enlighten me ?

Re:I'm not sure about the Verizon flavor but

[FrankHaynes]

The closer it gets to light, the more it acts like light.

Re:not in my basement.

[swillden]

My phone doesn't work in my basement, and I live in my basement. No, not my mom's basement, my wonderful, fully furnished basement. The cats live upstairs...

So, you live in your cats' basement? Is that supposed to be better?

Re:No thank you to the "network nutrality"

[Oswald McWeany]

Eventually winter will bring ice zombies from the frozen north and doom all of humanity.

Canadians aren't THAT bad.