12 votes

What can I say about this 5G elixir? Try it on steaks! Cleans nylons! It's made for the home! The office! On fruits!

2 comments

  1. [2]
    patience_limited
    (edited )
    Link
    Oh, great galloping Jeebus bollocks yes, this. The more detailed and salient material is here:...

    Oh, great galloping Jeebus bollocks yes, this. The more detailed and salient material is here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/10/heavy-focus-5g-wireless-means-we-are-ignoring-68-million-americans-facing-high

    The engineering and economic reality is that wireless is neither a substitute for building wireline service, nor cost-effective for rural coverage, nor reliable.

    If you want to see how much damage a corrupted regulatory state can do with monopoly/oligopoly markets, it's all there. The U.S. remains a patchwork of services, usually slow and high cost, over the vast majority of its territory. The markets don't even follow population density - I'm dealing with a hospital system in Miami, where a single carrier is available - 20 Mb fiber at $700/month in most locations (not so useful for radiologists streaming 3D MRI data, either). And yet I visited a tiny town (pop. 6,000) in rural Michigan this week, where the community hospital has a 10 Gb circuit and there's affordable fiber to the home. And I mean rural - the nearest city with population greater than 100,000 is 70 miles away. [Verizon, the primary cellular service carrier, managed one bar of LTE service inside city limits, even with fiber already built - how long would you guess it will take them to add towers for 5G when there's no prospect of a 5G-to-the-home service monopoly?]

    That town's speedy service was the product of a co-op/carrier/regional hospital system partnership, where the node for essential services to the medical center became the nexus for services to the rest of the community.

    9 votes
    1. Gaywallet
      Link Parent
      This is what I want to see more of. City councils should be giving money to companies who are already going to install expensive fiber because they need it, in order to subsidize rolling it out to...

      That town's speedy service was the product of a co-op/carrier/regional hospital system partnership, where the node for essential services to the medical center became the nexus for services to the rest of the community.

      This is what I want to see more of. City councils should be giving money to companies who are already going to install expensive fiber because they need it, in order to subsidize rolling it out to the rest of the community. I would back a bill like this 100%.

      4 votes