While 1 Gbps speeds have been rolling out across major US marketplaces, many rural Americans have struggled to find high-speed Internet.
In the past companies had a difficult time justifying running miles of fiber to connect a handful of homes when running a mile of cable in a major city connects hundreds of paying customers. Many Internet services said the time involved would be too great for the return on their investment.
So millions of Americans faced slow dated DSL, dial-up, or satellite Internet. Now that is all changing.
Now companies like Frontier, Microsoft CenturyLink, and AT&T are all rolling out fixed wireless home Internet in rural areas as part of a new FCC push to bring better Internet to rural America. This new fixed wireless allows Internet companies to cover rural homes for a fraction of the cost of running a wire to each home.
Now, this is not 5G. We are still likely a year or so away from 5G wireless home Internet rolling out across the United States. This new system offers 10 Mbps to 20 Mbps down and this fixed wireless technology is ready to roll out today unlike 5G, which is still a few years away in these markets.
Although 10 to 20 Mbps may seem slow, it is a huge jump in speed compared to the 1.5 Mbps many rural Americans have right now.
5G is ultimately the answer to slow Internet speeds across the United States with its ability to offer fiber speeds wirelessly. 5G also is designed to better handle more devices and network congestion than 4G LTE.
Currently, a long list of companies are testing 5G including AT&T, Verizon, Dish, Charter, and Google. It is reported that by 2020 half of the United States should have 5G, but it is likely to start in larger markets making this new fixed wireless Internet for rural America so important.
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