[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...