Wireless companies have been advertising 5G for awhile now, where is it actually now and what is the timeline? I also read towers might need to be spaced every two to ten houses so I am also curious how this works. Can one be installed on your property without your consent and will they let you know in advance or knock first? I am in the US btw but I am curious about 5G everywhere. What are the health effects going to be and possible other unintended consequences? Do we really need faster internet?

I've inquired to my main carrier - ATT; and a secondary carrier I have - Verizon.

I live full-time in an RV and travel. Part of the nature of the retirement lifestyle we have chosen is spending almost no time near large cities. We stay in somewhat remote places by choice. And often 3G or less coverage is what we have available. I have 3 bars of 3G when I've been for the last three weeks. Will have basically the same thing Monday when we move 120 miles to a different RV park.

Both AT&T and Verizon have told me their focus in on large cities. Just not enough customers in many less populated areas to expand 5G to those areas. And that 5G has resulted in a several times increase in usage by customers where it is rolled out. Both are looking at significantly increased costs of not only upgrading existing cell towers, but having to add probably more than double the number they had first planned.

Both say they have 5G coverage in most areas in major cities, but in some locations over usage of cell towers can make getting 5G at a stream connection level difficult.

afcjets wrote:

Wireless companies have been advertising 5G for awhile now, where is it actually now and what is the timeline? I also read towers might need to be spaced every two to ten houses so I am also curious how this works. Can one be installed on your property without your consent and will they let you know in advance or knock first? I am in the US btw but I am curious about 5G everywhere. What are the health effects going to be and possible other unintended consequences? Do we really need faster internet?

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/5g-release ... -5063.html covers a lot of this.

Where it actually is now: Only a few flagship expensive phones support it, but more are coming. Without the phones the rest is moot. My personal experience working on a company developing a 5G node that would hang off telephone poles was that the big vendors were still kicking tires but were not doing mass deployment yet.

Tower spacing every 2-10 houses: Yes, if the carrier is using the high bands at millimeter wavelengths. Some carriers are not, they're just repurposing low and mid frequency bands for 5G use. The article gives a breakdown.

Tower on your property? I doubt it, the article suggests they will repurpose existing sites in high density urban areas which are already pretty darn close together, and as above, I bet a lot of the stuff ends up hanging off telephone poles once we see it roll out to less urban areas. However the stuff hanging off telephone poles comes with a price point that needs a lot of people to already have 5G phones before it makes much sense.

Health effects: TFA suggests the concern was based on one study the NYT popularized but was flawed. I'm sure more studies will come along.

Do we really need faster Internet? Seems to be needed most in dense urban areas where 4G is maxed out.

rfields5421 wrote:

I've inquired to my main carrier - ATT; and a secondary carrier I have - Verizon.

I live full-time in an RV and travel. Part of the nature of the retirement lifestyle we have chosen is spending almost no time near large cities. We stay in somewhat remote places by choice. And often 3G or less coverage is what we have available. I have 3 bars of 3G when I've been for the last three weeks. Will have basically the same thing Monday when we move 120 miles to a different RV park.

Both AT&T and Verizon have told me their focus in on large cities. Just not enough customers in many less populated areas to expand 5G to those areas. And that 5G has resulted in a several times increase in usage by customers where it is rolled out. Both are looking at significantly increased costs of not only upgrading existing cell towers, but having to add probably more than double the number they had first planned.

Both say they have 5G coverage in most areas in major cities, but in some locations over usage of cell towers can make getting 5G at a stream connection level difficult.

Seems like you are a great potential customer for SpaceX's Starlink service, once it's all up and running.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink

If it lives up to promise, it could easily change the entire economics of internet access especially for users in areas with lower population.

Right now geostationary satellite data signals of near 1 meg per second download run about $250 to $450 per month depending upon usage. My current cell network based internet capability runs about $150 per month through my telephone plans. We are not graphic intensive or streaming at this point. But the wife wants Netflix to work.

Since I would need a mobile antenna that can be reset each time I move, that limits me to higher costs plans, them expecting to spend more on support from me complaining about a poor signal. My hardware costs would be about $1,500-2,500.

Not ready to pay that yet.

Starlink looks interesting, but I want to see some firm pricing.

Right now, I'm a bit unhappy with Starlink, the satellite groups are messing with 'dark skies' in some place we camp. Pure night skies where the Milky War looks as good to the Mk 1 Mod 0 human eyeball as a Hubble picture is a wonderful thing to behold.

My cheapo T-Mobile for seniors comes standard with 3G, which we relied on when staying in Seattle. Lately it has got slow, but that may be an obsolete chrome book I keep in our mini-condo (gotta replace it by June). I may call them and pay the extra $10 for 4G, but only if it will work better.

In many cases 5G might not be faster than 4G, notably if the same/similar frequencies are used : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G

And no, there won't be towers every ten houses. As for your property, it's your property (in China, that's another story).

frmrCapCadet wrote:

My cheapo T-Mobile for seniors comes standard with 3G, which we relied on when staying in Seattle. Lately it has got slow, but that may be an obsolete chrome book I keep in our mini-condo (gotta replace it by June). I may call them and pay the extra $10 for 4G, but only if it will work better.

Sprint is so terrible in certain metro areas that switching from 4G to 3G resolves a lot of issues as there is less competition on the 3G network.

We had Sprint once, and T-Mobile once. My home is in rural Arkansas.

Zip point zero coverage. Not even roaming.

We keep one phone on AT&T and one on Verizon because traveling across 46 states, we have found that neither has true nationwide coverage. And I'm not talking about the wide open spaces out west. Never expected coverage in Yellowstone, near Yosemite, etc. Lot of miles of interstate out west with no cell coverage.

We've been places in Florida, eastern Virginia, Connecticut and Massachusetts where Verizon coverage in communities of 20-50,000 was unusable. Same thing with AT&T.

One of our favorite places we've visited was near San Diego. 18 driving miles, 12 miles straight line from the ocean. High Data coverage on both AT&T and Verizon maps. But in a valley, and no usable signal at all. For that month, we drove into Chula Vista (7 miles) and spent a couple hours at iHop in the late morning twice a week to do e-mail, banking, paying bills, FB and such. Some of the kids and grandkids felt like we had fallen off the earth.

rfields5421 wrote:

Right now geostationary satellite data signals of near 1 meg per second download run about $250 to $450 per month depending upon usage. My current cell network based internet capability runs about $150 per month through my telephone plans. We are not graphic intensive or streaming at this point. But the wife wants Netflix to work.

Since I would need a mobile antenna that can be reset each time I move, that limits me to higher costs plans, them expecting to spend more on support from me complaining about a poor signal. My hardware costs would be about $1,500-2,500.

Not ready to pay that yet.

Starlink looks interesting, but I want to see some firm pricing.

Right now, I'm a bit unhappy with Starlink, the satellite groups are messing with 'dark skies' in some place we camp. Pure night skies where the Milky War looks as good to the Mk 1 Mod 0 human eyeball as a Hubble picture is a wonderful thing to behold.

I agree Starlink is early in their life cycle and we shall see how they chose to price it.

Also they acknowledge they did a bad job by not addressing light pollution. The last round of satellites had a coating on them designed to address the issue. Hopefully they continue to get better with time.

In reading the 5G link posted by Aesma above, we see climate scientists have much hate for 5G because it interferes with frequencies they use to measure water absorption. The almighty dollar won out, their concerns are being largely ignored. Yet this issue got very little traction compared to Starlink's issue, sigh.

Aesma wrote:

And no, there won't be towers every ten houses. As for your property, it's your property (in China, that's another story).

It's common in the US for municipalities to have right of ways on the property along side public roads, for telephone poles, utility boxes, etc. These will get used for 5G nodes, eventually.

One funny story was we designed the outside of our 5G boxes that hang off telephone pole wires to have no circular patterns on the outside.

Why? Well in gun-friendly USA, anything round was used as a target! Plenty of equipment returned to base with a bullet hole right where the circular pattern was, so we learned the hard way to remove such patterns.

A lot of time the same people who shot the equipment ended up having to make calls to telco/cable complaining they weren't getting service, without seeming to understand why.

Oh well, that's life in the USA!

What country are you guys talking about?

You might as well talk to these people:
https://4gantennashop.com/

They basically buy, slice/dice and resell plans from AT&T and T-Mobile, with high data allowance at higher speeds. Not sure if any of their offerings will suit your need and/or budget. I have been using my T-Mobile cell service via them for 4-5 years now.