5G home internet
What are the costs and implications? Nathan Taylor investigates.
5G is the new hotness in the mobile world, and the major mobile providers (Telstra, Optus, Vodafone) have started offering home internet services and devices using the new mobile technology now. So this month we’re taking a look at the technology as a home internet medium – how does it stack up against the competition, what are the implications of 5G, and what do you need to do to get it?
What is 5G again?
As you can probably guess from the name, 5G is an upgrade to the existing 4G mobile standards. Its headline feature is that it can use a far larger slice of spectrum across multiple bands to deliver much higher bandwidth than 4G. That has some interesting and complex implications for speed.
5G is capable of operating in three broad radio frequency bands: low-band (<1GHz), which is where most 4G services operate now; mid-band (2.5-4GHz) which is close to the band that Wi-Fi operates in; and high-band (24-100GHz) which is where there’s a huge amount of available spectrum and data-carrying power (greater than 1Gbps), but there are range and reception issues.
When you connect to a 5G network, your device will figure out which band(s) are available, and will use those that are, or possibly multiple bands at once using aggregation.
This is important. As you go up in radio frequency, you get more capacity to carry data, but extremely high frequency radio waves tend to bounce off surfaces rather than pass through, so you get reception issues. So there’s a negotiation between cell range, reception and speed. At the outer edge of a given cell’s range, you might only get 4G speeds; closer and the speeds might pick up dramatically as new bands are ‘unlocked’.
5G also has the advantage of much better latency than 4G, which is relevant for gaming as well as video conferencing and voice chat. It still won’t be as high as optimum landline latency, but practical latency of <20ms is possible.
Availability
5G coverage in Australia is somewhat spotty, with most of the rollout confined to the most profitable areas for operators. Telstra currently claims 75 percent of the population is covered by its network.
Optus and Vodafone have lighter coverage maps, with a distinction between outdoor and indoor 5G availability. Vodafone remains very patchy even in Sydney, but the company claims the rollout is accelerating.
In April, analyst Opensignal ( www.opensignal.com) released a report on 5G in Australia, looking at performance and availability from a set of users with 5G phones. According to the report, Telstra users were connected to 5G 11.5 percent of the time, Optus 7.5 percent of the time, and Vodafone four percent of the time.
For home internet users, all three major networks do now offer 5G home internet access plans for people in coverage zones.
Optus offers a $75 or $90 plan, both with unlimited data. The $75 plan is capped at 100mbps; the $90 plan has uncapped speed with an advertised ‘typical’ speed of 225mbps. It also has a 50mbps guarantee and no startup fee on a 24-month plan (or $200 on no contract).
Vodafone recently announced a 5G home internet plan with a similar price model: $75 for 100mbps with no data caps; or $85 with no speed cap or data cap. The modem is $612, but is free if you’re willing to sign up for three years.
Telstra sells a home modem (for an eye-watering $600) and has two different 5G plans designed for home users, all with uncapped speeds and no excess data charges (instead shaping the connection if the data cap is used). For $55 per month you can get 75GB; or 400GB for $85.
Speeds
The big question on everyone’s mind when 5G was introduced was: is it the real deal? Could we really get mobile speeds that are many multiples of 4G’s already decent speeds? The answer is yes, at least in locations where the full-fat 5G experience is available.
According to Opensignal’s April benchmarks, mobile users connected to Telstra’s 5G cells could expect speeds averaging 253.8mbps, 5.3 times faster than the average speed on the larger Telstra network. Optus users could expect 239.6mbps, or 6.5 times faster than the average speed on the Optus network. Vodafone users experienced speeds of 138.5mbps, 3.6 times higher than average.
Similar results have been found by Ookla, which runs the site Speedtest.net. In April this year, it released a report revealing that the average 5G speed on Telstra was 295mbps, Optus was 309.86mbps and Vodafone was 184.98.
Latencies are also significantly improved over 4G. Telecoms guide WhistleOut ( www.whistleout.com. au) released a report in June with some numbers on practical latency. In its tests, average latencies were in the low-teens for Telstra and Optus and high-teens for Vodafone. That’s very playable for online gaming, even those where latency is a huge factor.
5G in the home
The early home internet offerings, especially those from Optus and Vodafone, are actually quite generous. They offer unlimited data and generous or no speed caps, which actually compare quite favourably to many NBN landline service offerings and make 5G a very viable home internet option for people in coverage areas. There are some caveats, however:
The modems are superexpensive. Both Vodafone and Telstra are asking $600 for a 5G home modem. Compared to the sub-$100 modems you can get for landlines, this is a big up-front expense.
Latency is still not quite landline-class. Landlines are capable of single-digit latencies, which is ideal for gamers and users of video conferencing. Although 5G was promised to similar latencies, we’re not quite there yet; but they’re still very much better than 4G. As noted above, 5G is highly variable depending on where you are in relation to the cell and any intervening objects or buildings. You might find you only get effectively 4G speeds. You may be able to move the modem around your house and see if there’s better reception elsewhere – if you can move it to a point where it has a better ‘line of sight’ your local cell tower (next to a window is ideal), you might see a significant bump in speeds – but there may be nothing you can do. For that reason, long contracts can be risky.
You can potentially improve performance with external antennae and signal boosters. This is a very complicated option, involving the attachment of external 5G directional antennas pointed at the cell tower to the outside of your house, with either a direct line to the modem (if the modem supports external antennae) or to a signal booster. If you’re one for a home project, this can certainly work, but we would suggest doing a little location testing with a 5G mobile phone before committing to it.