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A 5G day may come when the courage of cable and DSL fails ... but it is not this day

AndrueC Silver badge
Meh

5G has the potential to make cable and DSL as antiquated and pointless as using a horse and a cart to drive to the supermarket. And it's already here.

I'm not convinced. 5G might offer 'as much bandwidth as most people currently need' therefore making a wired connection no longer a necessity but it can't ever beat a wired solution for throughput.

Radio waves have limited bandwidth and unless you use beam shaping that bandwidth is shared by the entire catchment area. I can't find any information on what bandwidth is available from a single 5G mast but I'd guess it's a few Gb/s at most. Say it's 5Gb/s. Now put that transmitter in a town so that it covers 5,000 properties. That's a paltry 1Mb/s per property. Now to be fair that's not really as bad as it sounds because it's rare for every property to be downloading at the same time. But still, in this day of Netflix et al. I'd question if an average of 1Mb/s per property was really adequate. By contrast an FTTP roll-out in the same area gives a potential of several Gb/s per property. Of course that's backhaul and ISP dependant but then that's true of a mast as well.

You could increase transmitter density but there are limits on that (planning permits for one but also just avoiding frequency overlapping). And anyway each mast uses a wired connection so eventually you're just approaching one mast per property which is the same as a wired solution.

So radio will only replace wired solutions if/when end user bandwidth requirements cease to grow and if they do so at a point where several hundred properties sharing a single mast can assure that level of bandwidth per property. I'm not saying it'll never happen but I remain sceptical.

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