I live in a major city with cable internet everywhere along with fiber in some areas (unfortunately not mine), but I’ve had multiple instances of carriers’ salespeople knock on my door selling 5G home internet service.

The reason this doesn’t make sense to me is 5G will always have a much higher latency than any wired alternative — it really only makes sense to sell this stuff in rural areas without the infrastructure. What’s more is the most recent carrier has a reputation for extraordinary coverage but their network is CDMA so their network speed is one of the worst in the city.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to sell this stuff elsewhere?

  • arthurpizza@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    30 miles south of LA, my choices were:

    • $65 for DSL through AT&T
    • $75 for Cable Internet (That they called Fiber) through Charter’s ancient network
    • $30 for TMo 5G when added to my family plan.

    The TMo had more than double the speed. We need competition in this space. All the legacy companies are fat, slow, and lazy.

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      But latency. If you’re into online gaming, that would be a detriment.

      Also I guarantee most people are still ok on 30Mbps. A 1080p Netflix stream consumes like 4Mbps.

      • Electric@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        I was concerned about latency too but no difference and I’ve had it for I think a year now. Legitimately the best value for decent internet in my area.

        • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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          4 months ago

          That’s fair, it only matters if you’re extremely competitive like competitive FPS etc. I’m too old to care that much anymore 🤣

          • Electric@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            I mean I played Apex at the time. Ping remained at 40-50 towards the nearest server. Probably says more about the state of the infrastructure though.

            Edit: Distance to server was about 1k miles for reference.

            • sunzu@kbin.run
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              4 months ago

              That’s prolly what the long would be anyway with server that far lol. Sound like distance issue here