[jkilpatr]

5G (at least the high speed kind) has really really bad penetration, T-mobiles 1.9Ghz has trouble working indoors 5G's 30, 40, and 70Ghz frequencies are much worse.

You will need direct line of sight to a tower optimistically a mile away. Otherwise you'll fall back to '5G' on traditional 4G spectrum and you won't get any faster speeds.

[smileysteve]

> 5G (at least the high speed kind) has really really bad penetration,

To be fair, both Fiber and Coax have far worse "penetration"; Changing the definition of a 5g fiber connector from "wireless to devices inside of a home" to "a small antenna you put on the outside of the house or by the window and a wifi router inside" drastically changes the definition, keeps infrastructure cheap, and the cost at the home is still significantly less.

[la_barba]

Sounds like you're talking about WiMax. I was briefly on WiMax in Bellevue, WA, but the service sucked, not sure if it was the tech itself or their infrastructure...

[smileysteve]

WiMax was the (pre)4G implementation using the old Nextel spectrum (a major reason why Sprint was an investor).

I had the EVO 4G on WiMax, had amazing speed, especially near the highways before anybody else did. Also made for a great hand warmer.

The point is that 5g may provide the product that most people want when they want fiber; have less additional infrastructure cost, and the wireless penetration doesn't matter if we consider a base station -- or a physical install (as required by fiber or coax)

[la_barba]

Yeah this was a while ago.. maybe 2007.

[mrep]

So put the base node somewhere high like a water tower, hill, or really tall pole and then put your home modem on the telephone pole or your chimney to establish line of site. They can even use beam forming to bounce their signals against other objects to get to their destination. Homes and base stations don't move so they actually seem like a good use case for 5g over phones which are consistently inside and moving which breaks the line of site.

[snowwrestler]

You don't need "5G" to do this; low-cost line-of-sight wireless networking technologies have existed for well over a decade now. There is a reason line-of-sight WISPs have not replaced, or in most cases even effectively competed against, wireline providers.

That reason is: it's far more difficult to provide reliable service this way than it seems at first.

[mrep]

What other low cost options are there and do they work with cell phones so that they get dual usage and thus the costs are amortized over more devices?

The verizon 5g home looks pretty good [0] if your current options are only dsl or cable which they are for a bunch of americans. It's even got a 4g backup connection.

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/verizon/comments/9lqp6n/i_got_5g_ho...

[josh2600]

We need like 1000x more cell sites working in coordination. Think slightly bigger than picocells.

There are a bunch of proposals on how to do this (I think Artemis networks is one if I remember the name). The problem is that existing roof rights don’t map well to a bunch of microcells.