Yes and no. If you are living near base station in a big city it will work. But in the countryside where no good connection from ISP equipment to the base station the bottleneck will be this link. Furthermore, 5G uses a higher frequency than LTE, it could be not cost-effective to cover remote regions with small number of users. Starlink could solve problems with cables, but adds problems with RTT. Maybe one day all FAANG companies will open data centres on Earth orbit.
> Maybe one day all FAANG companies will open data centres on Earth orbit.
I know you are joking, but the weight, power, and heat dissipation all make this impractical. They tried similar ideas with cargo containers and underwater enclosures, which were a lot more practical than outer space, but they didn't stick with it.
I think the main problem is spare parts. A long time ago I was working in the data centre. I don't remember any day when there was no problems with hardware.
The signal goes through the ionosphere to the satellite than to another satellite which has a link to the Earth. Starlink uses LEO, so there is 2400 km link(1200 km from/to the ground). 1 ms is time for the signal to travel for 300 km in a vacuum. So theoretically the lowest RTT could be about 8 ms. Right now RTT to my ISP is 2 ms.
Verizon has started rolling out 5G home internet. It's apparently pretty fast - not fiber fast, but still pretty fast, and with truly unlimited data for $70 month. Really exposes just how absolute bullshit their mobile plans at roughly $10/gb are. I've heard good things about it, and looking at their 5G map it's been installed in areas very close to my home in Chicago, but the stations need line of sight for internet and I'm about half a block out of the service area.
Click on a neighborhood and look at the dark red areas running on top of the streets. I have no idea how they're going to get 5g base stations covering all of the smaller residential streets; right now only the bigger streets & downtown are well covered. And even then the internet requires an antenna unit in a window with LoS to the base station, which is OK, but not sure how 5g is going to be practical for phones indoors.
to my knowledge, 5G and other cellular bands are regulated in most countries. You're dependant on an external decision if your area gets served.
If some radio bands with wide range technologies get unregulated for public usage and access to equipment is possible - then communities can decide on their own.
Wireless is a great solution when there is spectrum available. If you have access to low band frequencies as the cellular companies do you can blast through trees, walls, etc.
Even with that they need fiber to their towers to provide the speeds necessary
Yes, there's no suitable spectrum available to towers due to topography, etc..
I might have to build towers at both ends to run in a licensed range, eg: 11Ghz, and even there there's not good access. So I might still have to pay 20-60k to get access on top of the 5-10k for radios and registration of the licensed link. That easily builds 1-1.5 miles of fiber, and since I was just over 2 miles away from it, it became easier to just do that and have something reliable.
