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Verizon Nears 5G Launch Deals With Apple and Google: Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
In a statement Tuesday, Verizon announced deals making Apple and Google its first video providers for a 5G wireless service its planning to launch in four cities later this year. From the report: The home broadband service will debut in Los Angeles, Houston and Sacramento, California, as well as the newly announced fourth city of Indianapolis, Verizon said Tuesday in a statement. With the introduction, Verizon will provide 5G customers either a free Apple TV box or free subscription to Google's YouTube TV app for live television service, according to people familiar with the plan. After shelving its own online TV effort, New York-based Verizon decided to partner with the two technology giants for video content, a first step toward eventually competing nationally against internet and pay TV providers such as AT&T and Comcast Using fifth-generation wireless technology, Verizon plans to beam online services to home receivers, delivering speeds that match or exceed landline connections.
Average download speed in the US is 75.94Mbps as of the latter half of last year. The Verizon service has a theoretical limit north of 3Gbps.
Sure, that Verizon speed is bursty (and congestion constrained) and heavily dependent on conditions and distance. The problem isn't that speed will exceed wired. The problem is that it will end last-mile fiber deployment for the foreseeable future because it's cheaper for Verizon.
When the FCC defines broadband as 25 Mbps, many cellular wireless speeds already exceed wired speeds. Particularly in areas where the only broadband available is DSL (max speed of ADSL is 24 Mbps).
Cellular falls behind when lots of people are using bandwidth simultaneously. In wired connections, each node has a dedicated wire and bandwidth. But in wireless communications, the bandwidth is shared. 5G attempts to address that by using MIMO - basically using directional antennas to transmit different things to different locations over the same frequencies. (Imagine it as people in a room using directional flashlights to send messages to each other, instead of controlling a single light switch which turns the room's ceiling light on/off.) I'm curious to see how well it works when scaled up from the simple 2x2 and 3x3 MIMO found in 802.11ac routers.
You're thinking about it all wrong. With 3G and LTE, congestion prevents people from using their metered connections as much as they want to. With 5G, people will be able to consume their allotment even faster, thus encouraging spending more for a higher cap.
Why would they spend $billions on 5G rollout/spectrum purchase just to give people greater benefit for the same price? What's that you say, they have to because of the competition? Bahahahaha!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.