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?

  • Scott@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    Not saying cable connection would be faster, when I was in Tennessee on 5g I was seeing speeds of 700/350.

    But the latency was noticeable longer than a fiber connection, for reference with ATT fiber I can get 5-6ms, over the ATT 5g network I was averaging 80ms.

    • MelodiousFunk@slrpnk.net
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      4 months ago

      I average about 20ms (Comcast over WiFi). TMo was about 30ms. I just checked my cell connection (also ATT 5g), and matched your 80ms. Not sure what the Comcast ping would be wired, but I don’t run anything significant over Ethernet. The jump from 5ms to 30ms is noticeable with gaming for sure. But in my use case, the latency difference would have been negligible.