Can 5G Compete with Cable Broadband?

One of the recurring themes used to promote 5G is that wireless broadband is going to become a serious competitor to wireline broadband. The Federal Communications Commission and the industry have implied for years that 5G cellular will be a competitor for landline broadband. I still can’t see many homes accepting 5G cellular as a replacement for landline broadband. I can think of a number of important ways to compare and contrast the two broadband products:

• Speed: The 5G download speeds on regular cellphones should creep up 100 Mbps over the next 5 to 7 years, and would rival the base speeds on cable company networks – but by that time the cable companies are likely to upgrade all of their customers to 250 Mbps.
• Overall capacity: There is no scenario where cellular networks can somehow steal away a lot of the traffic carried by landlines.
• Household Usage: Household usage of broadband has exploded. By 2024 the average home might be using more than 700 gigabytes per month.
• Data Caps: The above shows the absurdity of the claim that cellular will somehow overtake landline broadband. Even the ‘unlimited’ cellular data plans today are capped or heavily throttled after 20 or so gigabytes of data used in a month. Cellular companies are not likely to raise the data caps much because they don’t want heavy data users sucking all of the capacity out of the cellular networks.
• Pricing: For 5G to compete with landline broadband, the cellular companies would have to kill the paradigm of selling an extra gigabyte of data for $10.