As someone working on 5G, I disagree strongly. 5G supports up to 1 million devices per square kilometer (the most dense city, Manila, in the world has about 50k people per square kilometer). My understanding is that you can have about 100k devices per square kilometer before speeds drop below ideal (20 gigabit). So even if everyone in downtown Manila wanted stream seven movies at once they could all do it. As other commenters have said, that’s because of clever techniques like beamforming and OFDMA.
But cities aren’t really the area where 5G home internet provides an advantage. Sure, the protocols more efficient than WiFi - the tower allocated bandwidth and time blocks to coordinate transmissions instead of having everyone’s router blast away on the same hardcoded WiFi channels. But it still achieves those high speeds and great connectivity through having a bunch of small cell towers - hardly much different than wired internet.
The real advantage is suburbs, small towns, and rural areas. You solve the last mile problem for cables, eliminate outages, and you do it all with a couple large cell towers.
Yeah, people (or more likely businesses) with high throughput needs will still use wired connections. But it will be because the electricity costs of transmitting from a 5G tower are high enough that there’s always a base cost per GB, not because there isn’t enough bandwidth to go around.
Why do you expect 5G to eliminate outages when we can't eliminate them with existing LTE towers, with home wifi, or even with direct ethernet connections to modems?
As of now, my least reliable network is always my cellular network.
> you can have about 100k devices per square kilometer before speeds drop below ideal (20 gigabit)
When, though? We're far, far from this at the moment. What is going to fix it and when?
But cities aren’t really the area where 5G home internet provides an advantage. Sure, the protocols more efficient than WiFi - the tower allocated bandwidth and time blocks to coordinate transmissions instead of having everyone’s router blast away on the same hardcoded WiFi channels. But it still achieves those high speeds and great connectivity through having a bunch of small cell towers - hardly much different than wired internet.
The real advantage is suburbs, small towns, and rural areas. You solve the last mile problem for cables, eliminate outages, and you do it all with a couple large cell towers.
Yeah, people (or more likely businesses) with high throughput needs will still use wired connections. But it will be because the electricity costs of transmitting from a 5G tower are high enough that there’s always a base cost per GB, not because there isn’t enough bandwidth to go around.