[KerrAvon]

Cell-based internet in the US often doesn't work well in practice -- cell coverage tends to be incredibly spotty away from major roads. In populated areas, enough people are irrationally frightened of cell radiation to NIMBY additional cell towers required for coverage.

[MisterBastahrd]

I have no idea where you got that information from. I've been using T-Mobile for about half a year now, and it's leaps and bounds better than the ATT DSL I was using beforehand. I went from 30 Mbps down to 200, and even during high usage periods it's well over 100. Their customer service is also far less of a pain in the ass than ATT or Charter.

[freedomben]

why on earth would this comment be downvoted? This is absolutely true in some places, particularly in smaller states. To the downvoters, please go try using cell-based internet in nearly any big city in Wyoming and let us know how that goes. Idaho has a much higher population and even much of that is way too unreliable for home internet.

[1123581321]

It’s irrelevant, and wrong. 20 minutes outside a major US city wouldn’t be in Wyoming or Idaho; it would be in an area serviced by one of the newer 5G Internet offerings that gets 100-300 down. Or at least about to be.

Complaining about rain and cloudy days doesn’t matter when leaving a connection capped at 20/1. In practice it does work well from the perspective of someone leaving a bad wired service.

[Spivak]

I don't know why you're being downvoted. Cellular home internet isn't the same thing as your cell phone; you can be 20 miles from the nearest tower without it being an issue. Def not 300 down at that distance but when all you need to beat is 20 it's no issue.

[vel0city]

I didn't downvote the comment. Just wanting to address this idea:

> in nearly any big city in Wyoming

Every "big city" in Wyoming is smaller and way more remote than most "small cities" in the rest of the country. It is not really a good representation of the rest of the country. There are only four cities which break 30,000 people. There's 40 in Texas with over 100,000. Being 20 minutes out from a city of < 30,000 people is pretty radically different from being 20 minutes out from a city of > 1M people.

There's also a question of geography when it comes to places like Montana and Idaho compared to the rest of the country. I don't know if you looked out a window but the geography of Idaho and Montana looks pretty different than the geography of Kansas, Michigan, Florida, N+S Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, etc. Its way more difficult to operate cell infrastructure in such a place, and then on top of that each valley only has a few customers to try and cover the cost.

All in all, the experience of cellular infrastructure in Montana and Idaho are massively different from the majority of the rest of US consumers.

I've got family in the suburbs 20 minutes out from the deep urban areas of a large city. Their main home internet is T-Mobile 5G. It has stable and low enough latency for them to work remote a remote job with videocalling, they play regular online games and they even do Playstation cloud gaming on it without issue. I've seen it being demoed at county fairgrounds far outside the big cities where they offered free wifi, I was able to get pretty stable low latencies (~25ms) at several hundred megabits of throughput with a dozen+ people using it at the same time.

It might not work in every market. There's a lot of variables in place, even within a specific geographic area. But it is something viable for a large chunk of US households.

[freedomben]

> I don't know if you looked out a window but the geography of Idaho and Montana looks pretty different than the geography of Kansas, Michigan, Florida, N+S Carolina, Illinois, Ohio, etc.

I can't downvote you since you replied to my comment, but that's a pretty patronizing thing to say, (it's also classic big city elitism). You know absolutely nothing about me, so assuming that I'm some backward uber dumbass who hasn't even "looked out a window" let alone travelled anywhere else is not a safe assumption, and that's before we even get into my experience designing/deploying wireless comm systems. Assumptions like that just make you sound like an asshole.

[vel0city]

You replied to a comment stating "Cell-based internet in the US often doesn't work well in practice", and your proof of why it often doesn't work was Wyoming and Idaho. Most of the country (population-weighted, at least) in practice does not look like Wyoming and Idaho. You might as well argue cattle ranching is entirely impractical, just look at downtown San Francisco and NYC. How are herds of cattle supposed to graze there?

Also my comment completely acknowledged I don't know you. It literally states "I don't know if you've looked out a window", so its entirely open to the idea that you have indeed. But then it really makes one wonder why you think Wyoming and Idaho are good examples as to why most US consumers wouldn't be able to get cellular home internet despite knowing the massive geographic and population differences and the challenges those would pose.

[throitallaway]

> There's also a question of geography when it comes to places like Montana and Idaho compared to the rest of the country.

Duh. OP wasn't talking about cell service out in the boonies, they were talking about cell service in "big cities." Geography is not a concern in the case of cities in these states. The Bay area's geography is much more extreme than 99% of cities in WY/MT/ID. I've spent time in those states in the last few years (vanlife) and the cell service in cities is atrociously oversubscribed on Verizon. I have all three carriers, and surprisingly T-Mobile has great service (in the cities out there at least.)

[vel0city]

> OP wasn't talking about cell service out in the boonies

Every location in Wyoming is what a lot of the country would consider "the boonies". That's kind of my point. Its a massive outlier compared to where the majority of the US population lives and not really a good place to point to when saying "see, cellular internet often doesn't work, it doesn't work in Wyoming!"

[ghaff]

Cellular internet doesn't really work at my house 50 miles outside of Boston either. And, in fact, it goes out pretty predictably when I take the train in (presumably because the high-end closer-in suburbs where it goes out don't like cell towers).

[vel0city]

50 miles outside of Boston is an hour away, not 20 minutes. 50 miles outside of Boston it can get really rural.

I'd also point out modern cellular home internet can give a pretty different experience than what you get on your cell phone. Antenna design and placement can be a lot better. You can place the antenna in a place where you're more likely to get good reception instead of deep inside your house. The frequencies and channels used can sometimes be pretty different. You're less power limited than your phone. In the apartment where my family lives their phone cell service isn't very great but as mentioned they get low latency several hundred megabit service through their router near a window.

[quickthrowman]

For starters, there aren’t any big cities in Wyoming.

[COGlory]

Yeah, as a Montanan, I did a double-take at that comment.

[hamandcheese]

I switched my mother over to T-Mobile 5G home internet. She lives in a suburb in West Virginia. It works great!