(11-08-2018 02:08 PM)Wedge Wrote: If you want to see real acceleration in cord cutting, wait another year or two. When 5G data transmission becomes widely available, streaming video quality will be equal to cable/satellite quality, and then the lure of smaller bundles, plus being able to watch on a wide variety of devices, plus being able to cancel at any time, will convince a lot more folks to dump cable and satellite for these lower-obligation options.
Maybe in the densest and biggest urban cores. But that has a litany of problems as well.
I don't think there's enough spectrum to deal with multiple millions of people streaming HD video within a few square miles. Just look how even text messaging goes to crap in most football stadiums when you get 40,000+ people in one spot. Well that's the kind of density you have in places like NYC all the time. We've already got a jumbled mess of spectrum out there so vast that no smartphone on the planet can use all the US spectrum allocations at the same time. The "universal phone" has become a thing of the past. And not all spectrum is created equally. TMobile and Sprint have some spectrum that does a really poor job of penetrating into buildings. And they use it everywhere because they HAVE TO to keep up with demand.
Cellular providers have only barely more competition than broadband ISPs. AT&T. Verizon. TMobile. Sprint. Everybody else is bulk purchasing access to the former four. And the four are constantly trying to merge with each other if the FCC would let them.
And if you aren't in a dense urban area ... it's really only two: AT&T and Verizon. While TMobile and Sprint have actually done some good build out over the last few years ... they're still more or less the urban areas and the interstates that connect them. I remember as recently as 2-3 years ago I would lose TMobile data all the way down to Edge for 15-20 minutes at a time going to Atlanta on I-85.
Yes, right of way and having to "kiss the ring" for every f'n city and town and county council is a nightmare that nobody likes. Even companies that stuff billions under the mattress like Google don't want to put up with it. There's also a huge lack of competition making everything worse. But cellular doesn't fix these problems ... it just shifts them to different areas. Right of way becomes tower permitting, particularly if that tower has any appreciable height to it then the FAA gets involved too. Lack of pole space and fiber becomes lack of spectrum. Lack of competition remains the same.
Lastly ... even the evilest of broadband ISPs (ATT) have a 200-300 GB/mo use cap. You would probably have to pay, in today's market, easily over $200/mo to get that much high speed data over a cellular network. And HD video consumes a lot of data. 4K even more so.
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Cord Cutting Acceleration
