Can 5G replace everybody’s home broadband?

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More G's than your body has room for —

Can 5G replace everybody’s home broadband?

On kicking cable broadband to the curb, experts say "The answer is absolutely! Depending.”

Enlarge / Artist's impression of how fast your house might one day be with 5G mobile broadband.

Aurich Lawson / Getty

When it comes to the possibility of home broadband competition, we want to believe. And in the case of 5G mobile broadband, wireless carriers want us to believe, too. But whether or not technological and commercial realities will reward that faith remains unclear. As with 5G smartphones, the basic challenge here sits at the intersection of the electromagnetic spectrum and telecom infrastructure economics.

 

When delivered over millimeter-wave frequencies and their copious amounts of free spectrum, 5G can match the speed and latency of fiber-optic broadband, with downloads of 1 gigabit per second and ping times under 10 milliseconds. But on those frequencies of 24GHz and up, signals struggle to reach more than a thousand feet outdoors. Carriers can fix that by building many more cell sites, each with its own fiber backhaul, but a fiber-to-the-block build-out may not be appreciably cheaper than fiber-to-the-home deployments. And while residences don't move and don't mind wireless antennas larger than a shirt pocket—unlike individual wireless subscribers—residences also have walls that often block mmWave signals. (Presumably also unlike individual wireless subscribers.)

 

The other frequency flavors of 5G (the low- and mid-band ones) don't suffer mmWave's allergies to distance or drywall. But they also can't match its speed or its spectrum availability—which in the context of residential broadband means they may not sustain uncapped bandwidth.

 

So as much as residential customers might yearn for an alternative to their local telecom monopoly—or for any form of high-speed access besides laggy connectivity from satellites in geosynchronous orbit—5G doesn't yet rank as a sure thing. There's a promise, but many things still need to go right for that promise to be fulfilled.

 

Or, as New Street Research analyst Jonathan Chaplin phrased things in an email: "If your fundamental question is 'will 5G allow you to dump Comcast' the answer is absolutely! Depending."

Verizon’s bet on millimeter-wave broadband

Consider the 5G Home service that Verizon Wireless launched in parts of Houston, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, and Sacramento in October 2018 (later expanded to parts of Chicago).

 

At $70 a month for unlimited data—with a $20 discount if you have a $30 or higher Verizon Wireless smartphone plan—and with download speeds from 300 to 940 megabits per second, the service would compare well with cable even if so many cable Internet plans didn't include data caps and slap on modem-rental fees.

 

Reddit threads about the service in Houston, Sacramento and elsewhere offer a mix of praise for its performance (including reports of upload speeds in the range of 200Mbps, significantly faster than what most cable services offer) and complaints about it not being available at individual redditors' addresses.

Enlarge / Verizon's 5G Houston coverage as of December 2019, with 5G "Ultra Wideband" in dark pink. For an idea of how much of the Houston metro this covers, you can zoom out from the same location at this Google Maps link.

Verizon

"Towards the beginning of service, there were a few firmware issues with the modem Verizon provided, but they patched that within a month," said a software engineer in Sacramento who asked not to be named. "Since then, there's not been significant downtime that I noticed."

 

"Overall I'm happy with my 5G," wrote another 5G Home user in Houston who runs a crisis-management firm. "No downtime that I can remember. I don't have my exact speeds but it seems pretty quick. More than enough for my TV streaming and Web surfing."

 

"There were only a few short (less than 30 min?) cases of 5G service downtime that I can recall, and they were all mostly toward the beginning of my service, so I imagine they were able to fix those stability issues quickly enough," wrote Vincent Garcia, a software engineer in Sacramento. "My speeds seem to be the same as when I first got the service: 300-600 Mbps down, 120-140 Mbps up."

 

Garcia noted one other benefit: "One interesting thing I've noticed is that other ISPs in my area seem to have stepped up their game in terms of value (at least in terms of their initial contract period)."

 

One early fear raised about millimeter-wave 5G, that it would suffer from “rain fade” akin to what cuts out satellite-TV reception during showers, doesn’t yet appear to have emerged as a serious problem. Those Reddit discussions about Verizon’s service don’t mention it, while a Twitter search reveals no firsthand reports of rain-faded 5G.

 

Ashutosh Dutta, a research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, pointed to a 2019 study by researchers at the Indian Institute of Information Technology Kalyani and the University of Calcutta’s Institute of Radio Physics and Electronics in West Bengal, India. They found that “proper fade mitigation techniques” can keep even heavy rain from disrupting millimeter-wave communication at frequencies up to 40 GHz. Verizon’s 5G Home, at 28 and 39 GHz, sits on the forgiving side of that line.

 

Enlarge / Verizon's 5G Home service.

Verizon

But in the market at large, 5G Home remains an afterthought. Bob White, membership chair of the MacNexus Sacramento-area user group, said he was not aware of any of the several hundred MacNexus members who could take advantage of the service. "Only rumors and smoke," he commented in an email.

 

Verizon's 5G Home service is scarce for the same reason its 5G smartphone service is scarce: the millimeter-wave frequencies it employs for both services don't reach far. And while the company now provides coverage maps highlighting individual blocks with mobile 5G, would-be subscribers to 5G Home can only plug in their street addresses and hope they get lucky.

 

Verizon says it aims to sell 5G Home everywhere it offers mobile 5G but did not identify which cities among its 18 smartphone-5G markets would get the residential version next.

Enlarge / There are no 5G coverage maps of Sacramento, so here's a picture of the city's skyline instead.

J.Smith / Wikimedia Commons

(AT&T has also been testing millimeter-wave fixed wireless residential broadband but has left possible pricing open-ended.)

 

In a study released in March, MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett drew on records released by Sacramento's city government to conclude that after about six months of availability, Verizon had signed up under 3 percent of the single-family homes in range of its 5G Home signals. Those homes, in turn, only constituted 6 percent of the residential addresses in the areas he studied. In an email, Moffett professed himself no more enthusiastic about Verizon's prospects nine months later: "Millimeter-wave-spectrum propagation is too limited for the economics to be compelling."

 

Chaplin, with New Street Research, voiced similar doubts. Noting the dense deployment of cell sites that millimeter-wave spectrum requires, he commented: "This means that a wireless company almost needs to become a cable company to make it work."

 

At an investment conference in September, Verizon executive vice president and consumer group CEO Ronan Dunne said the carrier had turned one key corner by allowing most customers to position their 5G antennas indoors and install them themselves.

 

"We've moved in the year to a point now where almost 80 percent of the antenna are indoor rather than outdoor," Dunne told attendees of the Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2019 Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference. "So we're now ready to go mass market."

 

(Disclosure: I've done a lot of writing for Yahoo Finance, a news site Verizon owns.)

Enlarge / Not super-duper informative.

FCC

T-Mobile’s campaign promise

While Verizon has to draw enough customers for each small cell site to recoup its costs, T-Mobile may be setting itself up for the opposite problem—too many subscribers downloading too much data on its promised home-5G service.

 

The self-styled "uncarrier"—having called millimeter-wave 5G unworkable outside of dense urban pockets—has folded a different approach to 5G home broadband into its campaign to merge with Sprint.

 

Let us consummate this deal, T-Mobile told regulators, and we'll bring fast but reasonably long-range 5G to 9.5 million people by 2024 on Sprint's mid-band 2.5 GHz frequencies.

 

A lengthy and much-redacted filing with the Federal Communications Commission breaks down this pitch, starting with a few reasonably enticing bullet points:

• "an average download speed in excess of 100 Mbps or higher (with a minimum speed of 25/3 Mbps)";
• a customer-installable router, with no extra monthly fee required for it;
• no setup charge;
• no contract.

That filing does not, however, renounce data caps. A mostly blacked-out paragraph on page 18 and a completely redacted chart on page 19 show that T-Mobile has calculated its own forecasts for customer use and compared them to reported monthly average household use at Altice (250GB in the fourth quarter of 2018) and median data usage at Comcast (174 GB in December 2018).

 

T-Mobile's current smartphone plans enforce relatively generous limits on mobile hotspot usage, while the company's $50-per-month invitation-only 50Mbps 4G LTE home service T-Mobile announced in March does not include data caps. The filing expresses confidence in the ability of Sprint's 2.5GHz spectrum to add more capacity to the merged company's network than its current business model will need in every market.

 

"When a 2.5GHz radio is deployed on a tower, it produces a very large increment to capacity all at once," the filing reads. T-Mobile plans to combine those radios with the 600MHz spectrum underlying its own just-announced consumer 5G launch.

 

Enlarge / Like someone spilled Pepto-Bismol on our great nation.

T-Mobile

The filing continues:

While many of these areas need some 2.5GHz to be deployed in order to provide sufficient capacity to meet New T-Mobile's performance thresholds, traffic in these areas would end up putting very little load on the 2.5 GHz spectrum, leaving much of it available to provide wireless fixed broadband service. The result is that New T-Mobile will gain substantial excess capacity in a number of areas for a very low cost.

The phrase "in a number of areas" does a lot of work there, warned New Street's Chaplin.

 

"Sprint's 160MHz of 2.5GHz would account for maybe a year or two of capacity growth in big dense markets," Chaplin wrote of that carrier's spectrum holdings. "It is certainly true that T-Mobile could pursue and even serve 10MM homes in certain markets. But that is only 8 percent of the country."

 

A separate declaration to the FCC by T-Mobile President and Chief Operating Officer Mike Sievert offers a little more clarity. In it, Sievert—set to become T-Mobile's CEO in May after the carrier's infamously outspoken boss John Legere steps down—says the new 5G home-broadband service will cover 52 percent of US ZIP codes.

 

Sievert says that, by 2024, this new offering will reach deep into the territories of the two largest cable operators, touching 64 percent of Charter's footprint and 68 percent of Comcast's.

Sort-of-5G from some smaller rivals

Moffett expressed his own skepticism about using the scarcer spectrum of mid-band 5G for less-profitable fixed-wireless access. Smartphone users simply don't chew through as much data as people sitting in front of laptops or connected TVs on residential broadband connections.

Instead, he pointed to a few experiments with what you could call "5G-esque" home broadband.

 

"There are other models out there that may ultimately prove more interesting than Verizon's millimeter-wave approach," he wrote. "Starry's millimeter-wave-over-macrocells architecture has had some success in Boston, and mesh networks like Vivint and Common Networks on the West Coast have met with some success as well."

 

Starry is the startup founded by Chet Kanojia after his prior venture—the broadcast-to streaming TV service Aereo—suffered death via a questionable Supreme Court interpretation of copyright law. It uses licensed 37GHz millimeter-wave spectrum for its $50/month, 200Mbps, no-data-cap home Internet service.

 

Starry doesn't have to hang a mobile service off its cell sites and so can optimize its network for fixed-wireless service.

 

In a 2018 research note, Moffett wrote:

Starry's model for fixed wireless broadband is distinct from that of most of its competitors (most notably, Verizon) in that their service is delivered from macrocells rather than neighborhood-based small cells. Starry's secret sauce is a proprietary hybrid analog/digital beam forming technology that, by 'focusing' radio signals, allows Starry to achieve much greater propagation distances than would otherwise be the case.

But of course, there's still a catch. In Starry's case, it's that the company has, so far, confined its service to multiple-dwelling buildings in its initial markets of Boston, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC. The company has not yet shipped a single-family home system.

 

Vivint and Common Networks, meanwhile, use mesh-network setups to distribute wireless broadband across neighborhoods in Salt Lake City and the Bay Area, respectively. If you don't live in those places, that may not come as much comfort.

The last, best hope of broadband?

But for all of the engineering and economic hangups possible with 5G home broadband, at least this family of technologies has multiple companies working to make it happen in new markets.

 

You can't say that for incumbent technologies like cable, where the last serious attempt at pushing one cable company to "overbuild" into another's territory ended when the FCC lifted a condition governing Charter's 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable, or DSL, which is sandbagged by aging, un-upgraded infrastructure.

 

Google Fiber was supposed to crack open the resulting domination of many local markets by cable with breakthrough speeds and prices. But its rollout hasn't just stalled—it's reversed, with Google pulling out of Louisville this spring.

 

Smaller ISPs continue to build out fiber in local markets around the country, while low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations like those now being launched for OneWeb and SpaceX also bear watching. But wireless has the stronger theoretical potential to cover more ground more rapidly. And right now, 5G or something like it represents the best possibility for wireless to carry large quantities of data.

 

And while wireless has let us down before, 5G's raw speed means it ought to work exceptionally well in some edge cases. Chaplin noted one that cable operators in particular might appreciate: extending service the last few hundred feet to a potential customer's residence. Here's hoping.

 

 

Source: Can 5G replace everybody’s home broadband? (Ars Technica)