A quick look up says fiber optic wire can carry 50 Gbps (50,000 Mbps) but for some reason ISPs provide it at 300-500Mbps (100x slower)
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10 Gbps home internet
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A quick look up says fiber optic wire can carry 50 Gbps (50,000 Mbps) but for some reason ISPs provide it at 300-500Mbps (100x slower)
Because those are two different applications - cellular and home Internet. Sure, it's the same network core in the backbone, but 5G is more of an edge infrastructure that has much less density. And as I said, you're not streaming 8TB from Netflix. You're streaming the overwhelming majority of that directly from your local ISP in your home city due to the content delivery network architecture. Ask AI "Tell me about the Netflix CDN architecture and capacity in [[my home town and state]]"
I think you're also confusing price and cost. $55 isn't what 300Mb/s costs AT&T, it's what you pay AT&T. $15 isn't what it costs Netflix, it's what you pay them.
Also 4K doesn't require 25Mb/s. 25Mb/s is the recommended minimum in order to provide some buffer. I don't know many households who are doing three simulataneous 4K streams. In fact I don't think I know any. But if I knew someone who wanted to do that, then sure, 100Mb/s is a better choice than 50Mb/s.
5G is effectively an "application" on top of the "real" network backbones. It's still IP, but the design goals are not the same, and the capacity constraints are materially different. 5G is not designed to run at 100% utilization.
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No, that's not true. It depends how the what kind of fibre it is and how the fibre is "lit". Most homes that have fibre have GPON (2.5Gb/s in some configurations) and more rarely XPON (10Gb/s and upwards). But the larger carriers are today using multiple 1.2Tb/s links for their backbones, or with WDM some are doing 32Tb/s or even 64Tb/s.
But GPON and XPON are explicitly built for shared capacity via multiplexing. They assume that with a 10Gb/s link, for example, they can have 30 (or 20, or 80) x 1Gb/s customers, since most customers links sit largely idle - this is a common practice called "oversubscription".
Pac Bell was installing fiber to the home on an experimental basis in the late 1990's, though they didn't follow through with it. Main reason was pushback about the roadside cabinets needed to provide the service.
I can believe that 100%. My elderly parental units have complained about that very thing and similar, whether related to the Internet, their precious (cable) TV, etc.
I got that tidbit from someone who worked for PacBell at that time, and he was in a position to know about these issues.
