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I’m lucky. I have decent wired internet to my home office. It is not a gigabit cable, which is not the same as a real fiber gigabit, but at 300 Mbps, it is more than enough. But most people are not so lucky.
The FCC’s official definition of broadband is just 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up. Soon-to-be-out FCC Chairman Ajit Pai would like to have reduced that number to 10 Mbps in 2018. That’s not enough speed for the 2010s, regardless of 2020.
Today, well into 2021, many of us will still work from home, go to school virtually, and the only movies we will see will be the ones we are broadcasting. That takes up a lot of bandwidth.
How much bandwidth Let’s take an ordinary house of four for example. Everyone owns a smartphone, a PC, and a smart speaker. Plus, they all share two tablets, two game consoles, and a pair of 4K TVs. These days, it’s a safe bet that everyone uses these devices a lot. Based on Broadband’s Now Bandwidth Calculator, you should have at least a 180Mbps connection. Good luck getting that in many places.
To make matters worse, few of us have any real options when it comes to ISPs. The Institute for Local Self-Sufficiency in its latest report Monopoly Profiles: Big Cable and Telecom found that America’s largest ISPs, Comcast, Charter Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Frontier, and Windstream have divided the country in ways that ” 83.3 million Americans can only access broadband through a single provider. ”
If you live in the country, on the wrong side of the digital divide, life is even worse: BroadbandNow Research using FCC data found that 42 million do not even have broadband access because of its inadequate standard.
In my case, I am one of the few people with real options. I could use AT&T, except that while the company claims it can bring fiber to my house, it really can’t. In theory, you could get AT&T DSL. Except, wow, AT&T is phasing out DSL. If you live in the country, where DSL was often the only broadband you could get, you’re screwed.
I am lucky to have a real alternative: Skyrunner, a Western North Carolina Local Wireless ISP (WISP). If I lived beyond where the wire could go I would use it. But, with maximum speeds of 25Mbps, it is not fast enough for the overloads I put on my internet connection. Once upon a time, there were many local ISPs, but those days are long gone.
Most of them were removed by the major ISPs. They will not return. Also, in many places there are no local government ISPs. Large providers, with the support of the Pai FCC, successfully lobbied 22 state legislatures to ban community government ISPs.
It’s no wonder millions of people want Starlink satellite internet so badly. But bad news folks, even as Starlink has 12,000 satellites in the sky in 2025, analysts at Cowen Research estimate that Starlink will only support up to 485,000 simultaneous users at 100Mbps. That will help many rural users who would otherwise never see. broadband, but it does not replace urban or suburban Internet.
No matter where you live, more misery is coming on the internet. Big Internet service providers like AT&T, Charter / Spectrum and Comcast are introducing the data cap. Comcast, for example, will now put a 1.2 Terabyte (TB) monthly data cap on all of its customers in early 2021.
Who could use so much data you ask? You could.
Do you remember our family home with four people? In an eight-hour day, they would use an average of 648 Gigabytes a day, or 1.9TB a month. Internet bills are known to vary wildly and often come with hidden extra charges. But, as I write this in late December 2020, you can get that family’s 200Mbps connection for $ 40 a month. Not bad.
But, to cover your data overages, you will need to pay Comcast an additional $ 10 for each excess 50GB block until you reach its maximum overage rates of $ 100 per month. That is $ 140 and that is a lot of money. They would be better off avoiding overage charges by subscribing to an unlimited data plan for $ 30 a month. That’s $ 70, which is still not irrational, but with so many of us unemployed these days, it’s nothing either.
Or you could look at 5G. Excuse me while I laugh. There are many different types of 5G, and the ones that sound the best, like Verizon’s 5G ultra-wideband, are little more than marketing hype. Yes, you can get great speeds if you are standing next to one of your transmitters, but 99% of your users 99% of the time will only see 4G speeds with your 5G Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (DSS).
As for AT&T 5G, it’s not good. To quote my friends at PC Magazine in their latest mobile network benchmarks, “AT&T 5G at this point seems essentially useless.” I don’t expect that to change anytime soon in 2021.
The only 5G you’ll get if you want to use it for home broadband in 2021 will be T-Mobile’s home internet. For now, it still uses 4G LTE, but will soon roll out low-band 5G in the 600 MHz spectrum for home users. This will give you download speeds of around 150 Mbps.
No, those are not Verizon’s overpromised and underdelivered gigabit 5G mmWave speeds. But, with a range of tens of miles, it is just what rural users need. This T-Mobile plan will cost $ 50 a month without an annual contract and without data limits.
So yes, 5G will change the way we consume broadband in our home offices. But it won’t do it in the way all those glossy TV commercials expect. Instead of giving us faster Internet, it will provide many people who currently cannot get broadband access at true Internet speed.
As for the rest of the internet in 2021. I can only hope that under President Joe Biden, instead of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) helping big ISPs, they help users with a lock on data limits of landlines. and real incentives to expand broadband would be to more underserved users. After all, as Tom Wheeler, former chairman of the FCC and visiting fellow in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution, put it, we must recognize that “the Internet is no longer ‘nice to have’, it is fundamental.”
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