It was better than 4G, but required huge investment compared to 4G, which was a relatively easy upgrade from 3G for telecoms in terms of equipment, training, etc.
This went away as a side effect of re-classifying carriers as Title II entities by the FCC in 2005.
Plus most of the licenses were held by third parties who ended up re-leasing them to Clearwire, which was acquired by Sprint, which wasn’t able to push WiMax in the face of every other carrier choosing LTE.
What I still don’t understand is why WiMax couldn’t/didn’t take off as a rural broadband alternative (similar to how they’re touting 5G now), but that’s probably a topic for another day.
So people in rural areas will be chopping down lots of trees to try and gain line-of-sight? That doesn’t sound good.
There are some very tall antennae around here (rural central Texas) for cell phone towers. I’m sure people can build shorter ones on their property too.
I imagine they’ll just tack something on the roof of your house, if that takes off.
But really high-band 5G is meaningless bullshit. What matter is low-wave, because it means your connectivity will be faster and more consistent in congested areas. Same deal with wifi6, too, by the way. It’s not really much faster, but it’s better in busy spots.
Note wifi6e is a different beast.
Will a bird get fried if it flies through a 5G beam? I think the Air Force is putting 5G on its next-gen fighters to shoot down air-to-air missiles. I read this.
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Also
That’s pretty much what I said.
And once again I’m agreeing. With facts.
Have you seen any data on whether the low and mid band services are being deployed in rural areas, and whether they come with the traditionally cellular data caps? 5G could help solve some of the rural broadband issues, but it needs to be deployed and either have high caps or no caps in order to really be useful (none of this 25 GB or 100 GB cap like we often see on cellular “unlimited” plans).
Verizon has 5G Home Internet available today. It is currently $50 with a Verizon cellular plan or $70 without. Speeds are 300Mbps+ down with no data caps.
That said, even if they add moderate caps later the upside is still there. Most WISPs (wireless ISPs) serving rural areas have 10Mbps with very low caps so this is a significant improvement.
If the tech actually can connect people effectively and cost-effectively, it’ll be good. Where I live it’s very hard to get high speed (or even usable speed) Internet if you don’t have cable coming in to the neighborhood (read: outside your driveway/door) already. Rural, poor, rough terrain, scattered small population. Of course, it’s also nearly impossible to put up a tower or other edifice that might actually be visible to anyone. We’re the state that doesn’t allow billboards and heavily restricts any outdoor advertising including signs outside of a business. Now, most of the time this is cool, because the state sure is pretty, but the zero tolerance mentality can get in the way of some necessities, to say the least.
You just need AI cloaking devices for the towers, problem solved.
Or just paint’ em green and shape them like trees, like I’ve seen along highways in other places.
That looks pretty cool. I wonder if Verizon will expand it beyond the urban markets where they are currently focusing all their efforts. Hopefully they do…
If they can stick it to my ISP, often, I’m all for it. These bastards are used to not competing. They’re in for a rude awakening when they kids just bail on them entirely, assuming they haven’t already.
Not 5G, but telecom-related
How about 50%?
F*** AT&T. $5? So happy to leave them behind. First they raised my DirectTV streaming from $20 a month to $50-60 depending on tier. (So I cancelled.)
Switched to T-Mobile. I was paying $160 a month for two unlimited lines with all the frills on AT&T. Paying $81 a month for the same service for my son and myself on T-Mobile.