Question Does anyone use Verizon's home wifi equipment? Thinking of giving it a try.
- Thread starter axlrose
- Start date
Your large problem is other people live in different houses than you and have different cell coverage. This makes it impossible to predict how well any service like this will work.
In addition verizon has multiple so called "home" internet offering depending on what equipment they have where you live. So before tmobile got involved and started calling everything 5g and all other vendors followed there was a home 5G offering that you could get max rates of 1gbit. These were not designed for mobile use and are only in very small areas because the radio signals used do no go far. Only verizon and att deployed this type. If you can get this is works very well for home use. You most times need to use a receiver designed to be placed outside for optimum results.
Most other forms of their home internet services share towers with mobile users so the performance and vary greatly as people join and leave the tower as they drive by. If the tower you use happens to be close to a major highway you likely will see rush hour traffic affect your data rates.
For best results the router is best placed in a window on the side of your house nearest the cell tower. Most these router have some method to show you the signal level it gets from the tower
Like anything that uses radio of any kind you will be subject to interference from many sources including say weather. It will mostly work fine but do not attempt to play online games on the connection. Pretty much any other application can hide random delays in a radio network with buffers, games can not use this solution because something like a 1 or 2 second buffer will cause massive issues in a game. You will likely get random lag spikes in most online games if you attempt to play on any form of mobile broadband. I have not heard much about playing games on the best type of 5G because there is not a lot of coverage like this.
The good thing I noticed is there does not appear to be a data cap like they always did before. The problem I see is that it is as expensive as most physical cable internet options. I would always choose something that comes in on a wire unless you happen to live in one of those areas where nobody provide internet other than via wireless.
In addition verizon has multiple so called "home" internet offering depending on what equipment they have where you live. So before tmobile got involved and started calling everything 5g and all other vendors followed there was a home 5G offering that you could get max rates of 1gbit. These were not designed for mobile use and are only in very small areas because the radio signals used do no go far. Only verizon and att deployed this type. If you can get this is works very well for home use. You most times need to use a receiver designed to be placed outside for optimum results.
Most other forms of their home internet services share towers with mobile users so the performance and vary greatly as people join and leave the tower as they drive by. If the tower you use happens to be close to a major highway you likely will see rush hour traffic affect your data rates.
For best results the router is best placed in a window on the side of your house nearest the cell tower. Most these router have some method to show you the signal level it gets from the tower
Like anything that uses radio of any kind you will be subject to interference from many sources including say weather. It will mostly work fine but do not attempt to play online games on the connection. Pretty much any other application can hide random delays in a radio network with buffers, games can not use this solution because something like a 1 or 2 second buffer will cause massive issues in a game. You will likely get random lag spikes in most online games if you attempt to play on any form of mobile broadband. I have not heard much about playing games on the best type of 5G because there is not a lot of coverage like this.
The good thing I noticed is there does not appear to be a data cap like they always did before. The problem I see is that it is as expensive as most physical cable internet options. I would always choose something that comes in on a wire unless you happen to live in one of those areas where nobody provide internet other than via wireless.
That sounds like good advice in general. I do need to game online for sure. Also finding that I can get this for $25 a month vs our internt bill currently because of our current phone plans. And home internet currently maxes at about 175mbps, so getting speeds above that is a gain. Still sounds like I can't connect ap's to this type of device though? Such as my unifi ap's? Also, if I can get this working at 300mbps, or up to a big, still the same problem with gaming online? That would likely be a deal breaker. Money is tight, so trying to save some money if it makes sense functionally.
- May 29, 2013
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What was not covered in your previous thread -- https://forums.tomshardware.com/thr...ternet-and-also-a-wifi-6-mesh-system.3784882/ ??
If you can get it to $25 by bundling it with your cell plans it is a pretty good price. The rates I saw were either $60 or $80.
Gaming does not care about speed other than for initial install. It might use 1mbit/sec up and down. Many games use far less, closer to the 300kbit/sec range. What they want though is very consistent latency between the packets. This is how the game attempt to predict position based on it allowing for the delivery time of the data which does not work if the latency is jumping around. It does not matter if you have 300mbps or 1gbit,the latency needs to be very consistent and faster connection speed by itself does not make the latency better or worse.
Mobile broadband because you are sharing the total bandwidth with other people the latency will vary a lot as the system attempt to balance the load between everyone. It also to lesser extent than wifi is subject to interference but it causes the same issue of variable latency because of data retransmissions.
If you were to look at just gaming you would be better off using a slow dsl connection with 10mbps down and 1mbps up rather than say a mobile connection that gets 500mbps down and 50mbps up.
This is a problem very unique to online gaming and to a lesser extent something like video conferencing. Almost any other kind of application prefers more bandwidth and does not care about latency too much.
Don't expect to get 300mbps on verizon. After you posted this I went and read their plans in detail. It is the standard smoke an mirrors all cell phone companies have. The only new thing that makes it very interesting is it really doesn't have a monthly data cap.
Like every other vendor verizon is calling pretty much everything they now offer 5G. Like most vendors the vast majority of the network was what they use to call LTE + or LTE advanced. It doesn't run any faster they just changed the name. Verizon does offer true 5g that runs up on the 60ghz radio band but it is limited to large cities and only tiny part of them. In addition in the fine print it says it will drop to the older 4GLTE if the signal is not good enough. To make matters even worse they also say in the fine print they will prioritize other users (ie mobile users) traffic over home users.
I seriously doubt you will get 300mbps. If you have verizon cell plans see how fast the phone runs. I would not expect much difference espeically if you have a 5g phone.
Still it is better than they used to offer, they used to have data caps that made these plans unusable for most home users.
Gaming does not care about speed other than for initial install. It might use 1mbit/sec up and down. Many games use far less, closer to the 300kbit/sec range. What they want though is very consistent latency between the packets. This is how the game attempt to predict position based on it allowing for the delivery time of the data which does not work if the latency is jumping around. It does not matter if you have 300mbps or 1gbit,the latency needs to be very consistent and faster connection speed by itself does not make the latency better or worse.
Mobile broadband because you are sharing the total bandwidth with other people the latency will vary a lot as the system attempt to balance the load between everyone. It also to lesser extent than wifi is subject to interference but it causes the same issue of variable latency because of data retransmissions.
If you were to look at just gaming you would be better off using a slow dsl connection with 10mbps down and 1mbps up rather than say a mobile connection that gets 500mbps down and 50mbps up.
This is a problem very unique to online gaming and to a lesser extent something like video conferencing. Almost any other kind of application prefers more bandwidth and does not care about latency too much.
Don't expect to get 300mbps on verizon. After you posted this I went and read their plans in detail. It is the standard smoke an mirrors all cell phone companies have. The only new thing that makes it very interesting is it really doesn't have a monthly data cap.
Like every other vendor verizon is calling pretty much everything they now offer 5G. Like most vendors the vast majority of the network was what they use to call LTE + or LTE advanced. It doesn't run any faster they just changed the name. Verizon does offer true 5g that runs up on the 60ghz radio band but it is limited to large cities and only tiny part of them. In addition in the fine print it says it will drop to the older 4GLTE if the signal is not good enough. To make matters even worse they also say in the fine print they will prioritize other users (ie mobile users) traffic over home users.
I seriously doubt you will get 300mbps. If you have verizon cell plans see how fast the phone runs. I would not expect much difference espeically if you have a 5g phone.
Still it is better than they used to offer, they used to have data caps that made these plans unusable for most home users.
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