Magnify / Artist’s impression of how fast your home could ever be with 5G mobile broadband.
Aurich Lawson / Getty
When it comes to the possibility of home broadband competition, we want to believe. And in the case of 5G mobile broadband, wireless providers also want us to believe. But whether technological and commercial realities will reward that belief remains unclear. As with 5G smartphones, the basic challenge here lies at the intersection of the electromagnetic spectrum and the economy of the telecom infrastructure.
When delivered via millimeter wave frequencies and their abundant amounts of free spectrum, 5G can match the speed and latency of fiber optic broadband, with downloads of 1 gigabit per second and ping times under 10 milliseconds. But at those frequencies of 24 GHz and higher, signals are struggling to reach more than a thousand feet outside. Carriers can solve that by building many more cell sites, each with its own fiber backhaul, but a fiber-to-the-block build-out may not be noticeably cheaper than fiber-to-the-house implementations. And while residences don’t move and don’t mind making wireless antennas larger than a breast pocket – unlike individual wireless subscribers – residences also have walls that often block mmWave signals. (Probably also unlike individual wireless subscribers.)
The other frequency tastes of 5G (the low and mid band) do not suffer from mmWave’s distance allergies or drywall. But they also cannot match the speed or availability of the spectrum – which in the context of broadband for homes means that they may not support unlimited bandwidth.
So as much as residential customers want an alternative to their local telecom monopoly – or any form of fast access in addition to laggy connectivity from satellites in a geosynchronous orbit – 5G is not yet certain. There is a promise, but many things still have to go well to live up to that promise.
Or, as New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin put things in an email: “If your basic question is ‘allow 5G to dump Comcast’, the answer is absolute! Dependent.”
Verizon’s bet on millimeter-wave broadband
Consider the 5G Home service that Verizon Wireless launched in parts of Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Sacramento in October 2018 (later extended to parts of Chicago).
For $ 70 per month for unlimited data – with a $ 20 discount if you have a $ 30 or higher Verizon Wireless smartphone plan – and with download speeds of 300 to 940 megabits per second, the service would be comparable to cable, even if there were so many cable internet plans are excluding data caps and limp on modem rental costs.
Reddit threads about the service in Houston, Sacramento and elsewhere offer a mix of praise for performance (including reports on upload speeds in the 200 Mbps range, considerably faster than what most cable services offer) and complaints about unavailability of individual redditors’ addresses.
Enlarge / Verizon’s 5G Houston coverage from December 2019, with 5G “Ultra Wideband” in dark pink. For an idea of how much of the Houston metro this covers, you can zoom out from the same location on this Google Maps link.
“There were some firmware issues with the Verizon modem delivered at the start of the service, but they were fixed within a month,” said a software engineer in Sacramento who asked not to be mentioned. “Since then I have not noticed significant downtime.”
“I am generally happy with my 5G,” wrote another 5G Home user in Houston who runs a crisis management company. “No downtime I can remember. I don’t have my exact speeds, but it seems pretty fast. More than enough for my TV streaming and web surfing.”
“There were only a few short (less than 30 minutes?) Cases of 5G downtime of the service that I can remember, and they were all mostly at the start of my service, so I imagine they would have those stability issues soon enough Vincent Garcia, a software engineer in Sacramento, wrote. “My speeds seem to be the same as when I first got the service: 300-600 Mbps lower, 120-140 Mbps higher.”
Garcia noted another advantage: “An interesting thing I have noticed is that other ISPs in my area seem to have stepped up their game in value (at least as far as their original contract period is concerned).”
An early fear of millimeter wave 5G that it would suffer from “rain fading”, similar to what cuts off the reception of satellite TV during showers, does not seem to have arisen as a serious problem. Those Reddit discussions about Verizon’s service don’t mention it, while a Twitter search doesn’t reveal first-hand reports of rain-blurred 5G.
Ashutosh Dutta, research scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, pointed to a 2019 study by researchers at the Indian Institute of Information Technology Kalyani and the Institute of Radio Physics and Electronics at the University of Calcutta in West Bengal, India . They discovered that “proper fade reduction techniques” can prevent even heavy rainfall from disrupting communication with millimeter waves at frequencies up to 40 GHz. Verizon’s 5G Home, at 28 and 39 GHz, is on the forgiving side of that line.
