According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, competition among cable and wireless providers is intensifying in the internet service market. I’d love to lower my internet bill. Does anyone have experience with fixed wireless internet service? If so, is it fast and reliable? For context, I don’t game—I primarily stream TV content and use Wi‑Fi for general internet access at home.
Yes, when I moved in to my current home 5 years ago, we moved to a 4G connection. This worked fine until Covid and then swamped the local network towers as everyone worked from home!
Two years later, we gave 5G a go - and this worked fine, until the provider took down the nearest tower and signal strength dropped. I can’t remember why we dropped it, but we went on to cable, which worked well to start with, but towards the end of the contract, was just poor - and Virgin wanted to double our bill. At that point I’d started working from home as well, so I moved to Fibre and have been using that fine since.
The 5G router I’ve now taken to the youth organisation I volunteer at and it’s replaced an old copper internet. We can’t upgrade to fibre, as BT won’t supply us as we don’t have a postcode (how they provide us currently then I don’t know!) Anyhow, that’s taken our speeds from 2Mbps up to 200Mbps and we can now actually operate as we’re supposed to.
As pointed out by one of the providers when I left them for the 5G - the UK OFCOM speed guarantee doesn’t apply to mobile broadband, so if it’s good, it’s good. If it’s bad, it’s bad. However, the freedom of having the router where I wanted it and not next to an incoming wire was good.
It depends on your location (state, county, city, neighborhood). For me it’s sloooowww.
I’m not sure if this is a great test, but if you take your iPhone while in your home, turn off WiFi, let it connect to your wireless provider and then go to fast.com and see what speed it gets. It might give you an idea of how fast it would be.
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Some experience. I don’t think you’ll be too happy with it unless your current ISP isn’t very good or unusually expensive. If you do get one, plan on getting an antenna, like these.
https://www.waveform.com/pages/maximize-your-verizon-4g-5g-home-internet
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It was the only realistic option at my son’s rural house (unless we paid Starlink, which we did not want to for several reasons).
He used a specialist provider, who did a radio survey at his house and had access to a service provider database, to find the tower (several miles away) with the best signal and capacity, and set up a directional, specialist outdoor antenna tied to a router indoors. It’s been rock solid (only 4G available, so around 90Mbps). Can drop out briefly in very heavy rain.