A brave new world

[Ninurta]

In Finland its basically impossible for a private person to get a phone landline, but can still get a landline internet. But the mobile internet is so fast and cheep. For unlimited internet (100mbs) unlimited phone calls and unlimited mms and sms with in Finland is about 29e and cheaper for you have been a customer for a long time.
Now the question is how cheep will 5g be, and how good will the coverage be. Me I wont be taking 5g, but I believe that with in a few years they will only offer 5g

In the US, we push landline telephones pretty hard (I'm currently working on contract to a telecommunications company), but fewer and fewer people are willing to get them, as most have a mobile phone and cannot comprehend the value of having a land line. Landline phones run off of a bank of 45 volt batteries at the central office, and so will work even during power outages (as long as the lines are still intact) - mobile phones will not. Here in the US, landlines are tied to an E-911 location of the hardwired phone, and mobile phones (by virtue of being mobile) cannot be - this means if you call for help in an emergency, they can find you right away if you call from a land line, and have to hunt around if you are on a mobile phone.

I learned the hard way about mobile phones not working in power outages in 2003, when I went to provide security in eastern North Carolina after a hurricane struck (I think it's name was "Isabelle"). My employer supplied all of us with mobile phones because of the isolated nature of our service - I and one other man were guarding a big pile of money out in the middle of nowhere (i.e. a bank at a podunk crossroad), in 12 hour shifts - but the phones were useless, as there was no signal due to there being no power anywhere. So we were on our own anyhow. If we ran into trouble we just had to handle it, because there was no way to call in any cavalry. The hurricane had dropped the landlines for the hardwired phones in that case - it wasn't just a normal power outage.

I do not have a land line myself, so the shiny new E-911 plaque they've placed just off my property is useless to them - no one will ever be calling from it. Mobile phone signals do not penetrate to my location, because of the intervening mountains, so I technically have no phone service here at all... except that I've got a network extender tied into my internet to provide a bubble of service surrounding my house which reaches just into the road from it. That extender can be, and is, disconnected from the internet at will and upon occasion, which effectively blinds any would-be eavesdroppers.

I do not (well, CAN not since I fixed my phone) use any wifi on my phone at all, so I don't care how many G's they throw at me, there is nothing anywhere near my person that is capable of receiving or using it. So my phone plan also has unlimited voice, mms, sms, and data usage, but the phone itself is incapable of using any of that except the voice service - I only get the "unlimited everything" plan for the unlimited calling - the rest is utterly useless to me. For the "unlimited everything" I pay $45.00 a month, but am unsure of how that translates to euros. That's about on par for what a landline would cost in this area.

Internet runs around $35 or $40 a month, and I get 24 mbps here (last time I ran a speed test, anyhow). They were supposed to push it up to 100 mbps, but I don't think they ever did - we get the short end of the stick out here in the hinterlands. Still, even at 24, the internet runs faster than my computers. I have 5 functional computers, but only 3 of them are on the internet, I do not stream video or game, so the 24 mbps is plenty fast enough, and faster than I need. Grace has a phone that is still internet capable, and we have a tablet apiece, so in total that is 6 devices that could use the internet, and we still have bandwidth to burn.

I don't see a need for 5G, but since kids do, it's coming anyhow, eventually. By the time it gets here to the boonies, I'll probably be off the internet altogether anyhow. When I can no longer get programs for Windows 7, that will be the end of my internet days, because I refuse to use Windows 10, which is just spyware packaged as an operating system. I dabble in Linux, but can't, as yet, get any useful programs for my normal computer activities (mostly GIS and CGI) that will work with it.

Fun fact - I repaired and re-imaged one of my desktop computers a couple of months ago. Windows would not install on it (it bitched at me about screen resolution, and would not install), so I installed Linux (Zorin OS flavor) on it instead, and much to my surprise it automatically connected to the internet without a cable to connect it, just my home wifi network. The machine apparently has built-in wifi, which I have never heard of in a desktop computer. Oddly, it only seems to work with Linux, as the Windows 7 I had on it before never gave me a hint that it could connect.

So, 5G is coming (it will get to you long before it gets to me, however), there is no way to stop it, and it's not nearly as useful as kids would have you believe... unless, maybe, you are a gamer. To me, it's just another flavor of wifi that I can't make full use of.

.