EE launches UK's first 5G mobile broadband plans

[shaithis]

I never at all for a moment believed the prices would make it a home BB alternative, apart from people who do nothing but light browsing.

Why would they make 5G cheaper than 4G? Where would be the incentive after all the infrastructure costs? Why even make it cheaper in the future?

Do people ever look at the trend in costs of mobile data? It only ever seems to move in one direction......

[BobF64]

Do people ever look at the trend in costs of mobile data? It only ever seems to move in one direction......

Of course, no one should be surprised by that. New things, that arent just upgrades of existing things, always cost more because there is a need to recoup investment, investment that wants dividends now rather than possibly later or never.

[watercooled]

5G May become a viable alternative for home broadband eventually, but not at the current price point. But early adopters always pay s premium for new technology - look how mobile price plans have reduced over the years. When I had my first phone from Orange, I was paying around £15/ month for 15 minutes/month!

But prices will fall in time and it probably will drive down the cost of fixed line connections, but probably not replace them in all situations. Businesses in particular will continue with fixed line (FTTP) for the guaranteed reliable bandwidth.

It has a lot to do with the capability of the technology, not just price points. In fact the price points and data caps are in some way dictated by this.

As above, perhaps for broadband users who do mainly web browsing and don't push past a few GB per month, but broadband dongles have existed for a long time with reasonable data caps for such usage.

Interestingly, ispreview have just published an article with some very interesting stats, exactly the sort of thing I was looking for for my last post! Also some stuff about popularity of dongles in there: https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.ph...use-rises.html

Also WRT costs, yeah for those providers charging a significant premium for 5G (though that doesn't seem to be the case so far anyway TBH - there's a possibility that might change after the introduction of the future spectrum, but it could be a hard sell to get people to upgrade from 5G to 5G...) we'll likely see prices come back down to Earth. But as for dropping considerably? Data ain't free, and usage continues to climb. That applies to cellular and fixed alike, but obviously to a greater degree on mobile given the smaller amount to go around (yeah, even with 5G NR). Technology providers are continuing to drive down cost per bit, but they're in a race against increasing demand.

To do a reality check, according to ispreview it's ~2.9GB mobile vs ~240GB fixed monthly averages, so roughly two orders of magnitude difference at the moment. And it's not like 4G is massively underutilised as-is. 5G doesn't bring orders of magnitude worth of improvements in spectral efficiency, and while some of that can be offset with more cell sites etc, that all costs money. It brings additional spectrum but again it's not orders of magnitude more than we already have, aside from the mmWave stuff which doesn't make it through walls etc. It brings many efficiency improvements and I don't mean to detract from that, but I think it's more than optimistic to see it as a large-scale fixed-line replacement.