Verizon: No 4G-Level Data Caps For 5G Home Service (pcmag.com) 56
Verizon recently announced that its upcoming 5G home internet service will not have the kinds of data limits you expect from current wireless services. It will reportedly be able to handle the average data load of a FiOS customer, and it won't be throttled down to 4G gigabyte caps. PC Magazine reports: Verizon has been trying out its new 5G home internet service for months. In a tour of its New Jersey lab, we got a closer look at the 5G antenna setup we saw at Mobile World Congress in February. It's a silver device the size of a paperback book, which connects to a Wi-Fi router with a display. You're supposed to put in a window facing Verizon's 5G service tower. In the test lab, engineer David Binczewski (below) showed us how the company is still working through the challenges of high-frequency, short-distance, millimeter-wave 5G -- most notably, how to penetrate various materials. In a chamber designed to test new 5G devices, he held up a piece of wood between a 5G emitter and a receiver, and we watched the signal fuzz out a bit on a nearby equipment screen. During a roundtable, VP of network support Mike Haberman, some other Verizon folks, and the assembled journalists agreed that an average data cap in the vicinity of 180GB/month would satisfy the average consumer. That's far more than Verizon's current 4G traffic management limit, where folks who use more than 22GB get sent to the back of the line if a tower is congested.
How many Targeted subs per node and back haul from (Score:2)
How many Targeted subs per node and back haul from each node?
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Typically, each launcher has its own targeting system, such that a single destroyer can target more subs than any nation other than Russia or the US can realistically dispatch together.
However, the debris tends to sink, so it is rarely hauled back . . . :)
hawk
Um.... (Score:2)
So what does that say about them, their advertising, and their current limit?
180GB cap? Good for handhelds, maybe... (Score:2)
180GB is probably more than enough for a handheld user, but for a home internet service where you dealing with 1080p-4K videos?
If people give up on the idea of regular home streams of 1080p - 4K video, sure 180G might be enough -- but I've easily had a majority of months in the past few years where my *upload* traffic was 1TB or more -- these tiny caps seem to expect everyone will be watching 240-360p videos on their handhelds from the cloud.
I guess large home theater screens along with the home PC are goi
Who Believes Verizon (Score:1)
Sure, today unlimited. Tomorrow, screw off loser you are using too much traffic. No more unlimited for you!!
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Oh, I'm sure that they'll have an Unlimited 5G data plan... for $200 a month. It will probably start throttling you after you download around 500 GB of data as well.
The plans that most people can actually afford will have much lower data caps, I'm sure.
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Oh, I'm sure that they'll have an Unlimited 5G data plan... for $200 a month. It will probably start throttling you after you download around 500 GB of data as well.
The plans that most people can actually afford will have much lower data caps, I'm sure.
Thank heavens we are getting rid of Net Neutrality. I see this story as a smoke screen for what is going to be happening soon.
Considering that there is no such thing as unlimited in the first place.
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A cap is a cap is cap (Score:2)
180 GB is nice.. as caps go -- but it's still cap, that can be lowered, or additional fees can be added.
180 is about right. I hope they offer a lower cap (Score:2)
180GB is six hours a day of watching SD video, or plenty for just about anything other than video. So it seems about right - high enough to satisfy what most people want, but low enough to discourage the wasteful practice of leaving the TV on, in HD, all day and night when nobody is watching. That's the killer for bandwidth - streaming video that nobody is even watching.
I hope they offer a lower cap, lower price service as well. I use maybe 10GB / month. I work from home, but I don't watch video over wire
Hard to set a number. My kid reads. 10 cents / GB? (Score:3)
Yeah it's hard to come up with a single number that works well - that gives people what they want, but discourages reckless waste. As I mentioned, I probably use about 10GB and I work from home, over the internet. Intensive video uses bandwidth in a hurry, though.
180GB would cost $18 at 10 cents per GB. That would be cheap enough, perhaps, but still enough that people would turn off the TV (video stream) when they go to sleep or leave the house.
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Re: 180 is about right. I hope they offer a lower (Score:2)
Yes, and no. Some caps are per second, rather than per month, which just feels like it is slower, but you never get disconnected. Of course, you pay less if you opt for the slower connection. This is how it is/was in Finland when I lived there, and I much prefer it since I can rely on always being connected.l, irrespective of how much data is used.
It sounds like it is the same in the USA as it is in the UK, unfortunately. Here, there is no option to have a slower connection for less money, and the only thin
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You could blow through 180 GB of data by downloading just 2 or 3 games from Steam on your PC. If this is really for home service and not just for mobiles, you'll need a data cap closer to 500 GB to make it practical.
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I have a similar opinion: 4G still isn't properly rolled-out yet (even here in London it's hit-and-miss), so why would I care about 5G?
Fiber to the Home (Score:1)
I'll take a physical connection to a problematic wireless connection, any day. All that talk about losing direct broadcast television when it rains is really true; and, what about all those trees?
Is that so great? (Score:2)
Isn't xfinity 1TB? I was assuming the market they were going for was the areas where they have a land line presence but cable ruled. They seem way low for their 'average' for people who want to dump cable and go with streaming.
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Yes, I have a family of four on an Xfinity plan capped at 1 TB per month, and we often hit 80% of that and have gone over it twice. I don't know how a 180 GB cap is supposed to work for a home internet plan, unless it's targeted at people who don't stream video.
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Yes, I have a family of four on an Xfinity plan capped at 1 TB per month, and we often hit 80% of that and have gone over it twice. I don't know how a 180 GB cap is supposed to work for a home internet plan, unless it's targeted at people who don't stream video.
It is what you can use. If your cap was 50 Tbyte a month, you'd be edging up against it. It's the garage/junk drawer concept of you'll use everything available.
When my son was living at home, every increase in speed and amount of data was sucked up by his internet activity. When he moved out, it plummeted to maybe 10 percent, as well as sped up - a lot.
Then there is the elephant in the room. Wanna know why the cap pressure in the first place? Ads. Ads, served up to us in all their malware providing g
Re: Is that so great? (Score:2)
According to Comcast we were not generally over the cap before they instituted it. I think that's just how much data we use.
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Because.. (Score:2)
Comcast\Verizon\Xfinity has NEVER lied, EVER!
Really trust us!
Umm...Physics.... (Score:2)
So...Verison is planning to overcome physics? Wavelengths attenuate....
Rural areas? (Score:2)
Insufficient. (Score:2)
5G - Full of promise, but still years away (Score:3)
I think the telcos are going to figure out how to get fixed mobile broadband working. There's too much to lose if they don't. They've fallen way behind on broadband access (except for areas where Verizon invested in FiOS) and the cable companies have taken a huge lead. T-Mobile specifically has so much to gain, because they don't have a current broadband presence.
It's likely that especially for rural areas, this will be a game changing moment. There will likely be three or four truly high speed options for internet in places that might not even have one today.
Internet demands are going to continue to grow. 30 Mbps in 2020 may feel like 5 Mbps today. Usable, but pokey. Unusable if you have multiple devices (or users). A typical "heavy usage" household in 2020 might have demands to stream 4K Netflix/Hulu on a TV (~15Mbps), concurrent with a 4K YouTube feed (user #2) (~15Mbps), and life streaming kind of appliances (think Amazon Echo Show on steroids). (~5 Mbps). If you're doing any kind of file syncing or web browsing concurrently (user #3), you're going to get squeezed out. By ~2022, I would not be surprised if the working definition of "high speed internet" is 100 Mbps. Is 5G going to deliver that? For everyone?
Wood... (Score:2)
Meeting the needs of yesterday... tomorrow! (Score:4, Informative)
Verizon: Meeting the needs of yesterday... tomorrow!
While a 180GB data cap *might* be reasonable today, I regularly exceed that with regular Netflix streaming.
A 4K stream uses around 7 - 10GB/hour, so 180GB means 18 hours of streaming/month, or around a half hour a day.
8K TV's are already available, and they'll use at least twice the bandwidth.
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Yeah, anyone who thinks that 180 GB of data a month is enough for daily use doesn't have a modern game console. The game downloads are often over 50 GB each.
People who download PC games from Steam or stream Netflix in 4K will also blow through their data cap in a matter of days. If you're looking for a data cap to start with for home usage in 2018, it's got to be more like 500 GB to start.
Next generation speed - next generation caps (Score:5, Insightful)
The speed is higher, the cap is higher. Whoopie.
It is interesting that they discuss caps that would be OK with an average home user today. They won't be OK with an average home user by the time this comes out. Therefore, they are already planning on a network capacity designed to justify caps and gouging. The basis for the whining we'll hear 5 years from now is already in place.
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The cap being talked of here (180GB) is not a bandwidth cap, it is a total usage per month cap, and the service is a home service which is typically shared by a family and all devices in a home.
Our home usage per month tops 500 GB on a regular basis according to measurements at my router, and I don't even have 4G screens yet. I'd guess we stream about 20 device-hours a day of HD format video media and 8 hours a day of audio media. We are only a family of three. As people dump cable, this kind of usage will
Depending on cost.... (Score:2)
This may be valid as a backup internet solution. In my house, 180GB per month is certainly not enough, I doubt that would last a week. Not with 5 people and 4 Roku's and my Linux ISO downloading habit.
However, I'm in the rural SouthEast US, and I only have one internet provider (cable) available. My only backup solutions would be using an LTE modem, or resorting to HughesNet for Satellite. Which wouldn't be bad as backup solutions, but the cost for the meager amount of bandwidth they provide and the fact th
The first thing I thought of... (Score:1)
PC Magazine is still around??