Club409

I got a new phone with 5g even though I don't really care about it, reporting in and posting on 5g now, speed test says around 120 Mbps down whereas I'm around 60 something on the home wifi, so can y'all tell I posted harder and faster?

I wonder how soon home internet plans (separate from cell service) will be a thing of the past. Kinda like how we had Clear internet in Tucker, except instead of having a dedicated home ISP, you just add a 5G Hotspot device to your Verizon plan. Then point all your home wifi gadgets at that and be done.

And then further on down the line, every gadget will have its own 5G (7G?) radio built in, so no hotspot needed.

Then you've got nerds like me who will always want some portion of the home network running on wires.

right -- and I suppose the importance of a local-only network is not limited to nerdfolk, even more so with the Internet of Things expanding all the time.

So either the hotspot piece won't go away, and you'll have your local network sitting behind that connection, aggregating your home's internet needs like it does today.. or you'll still see 7G radios in every device that requires reaching out to the internet, but then they'll also be able to connect to a dedicated local network that hosts all of your local-only devices. (there are many IoT devices that could be local-only, but they still want to phone home and tell Facebook and Amazon when you made toast and how dark you like it).

btw you're def correct about battery life: exchanging radiation with your friendly neighborhood cell tower is more energy intensive than talking to your in-home access point.

I tend to think everything will just converge to the cell phone data at some point since the infrastructure and maintenance costs I assume would be less than laying fiber. But satellites are really expensive too I guess. My parents, when they were still in the country, had a Verizon hotspot for internet that worked pretty well. Better than any other options that they had.

I'm saying 7G because it's a speculative "what's going to happen in the future" kind of thing, and I don't think this scenario where nobody has Comcast is going to happen while 5G is the cell technology we're using.