One of the biggest holdups to cord cutting is the limited number of Internet service providers (ISPs) in every market. The fact is most Americans only have two ISPs to pick from and, if they are lucky, they have three options to pick from.
Yet that could all change with the release of 5G. 5G is the next generation wireless Internet standard, a standard that should offer Internet speeds from 100 Mbps to 1Gbps and theoretically go as fast as 10Gbps.
Not only is this seen as super-fast Internet for your phone but also as a way to bring Internet into your house. No longer will new ISPs be forced to run cables to every house—a process that could take years—they could setup a whole town in just a few months. Someday you could get a base that connects like your cellphone does to 5GB and from there you can connect your devices by Ethernet or standard Wi-Fi.
This will mean, for the first time, there could be real competition to be your in-home ISP. As always competition forces innovation and is good for the end consumer.
5G is already real in some markets if only in the testing phase. Verizon is rolling out 5G to 11 cities in 2017. Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Bernardsville (NJ), Brockton (MA), Dallas, Denver, Houston, Miami, Sacramento, Seattle, and Washington, DC should all receive 5G from Verizon this year.
AT&T is currently testing 5G in Austin, Texas, and Google and even Dish are working on their own versions of 5G.
Now we are still looking at a 2020 goal for a national roll out. The Dish CEO recently talked about its March 2020 target to have 70% of the US covered with 5G in Dish’s quarterly earnings call.
“We decided in 1992 that we were going to build satellites and by 1995 we launched our first satellite and we were able to cover the whole country and utilize our licenses,” Ergen said. “It was a complex three-year build… My experience has been those things go a lot smoother when you spend a fair amount of your time planning and not just doing things and then changing things. We’ve spent a lot of time planning and we feel like we’re in pretty good shape.”
5G, like all new technology, may have its hiccups, but this could be the game changer many cord cutters have hoped for. For now 5G should be something all cord cutters are keeping our eyes on.
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