Like myself and many others, you may have noticed strange utility poles popping up alongside roadways and intersections (usually brown in color).  I did some quick searching and it confirmed my suspicion.  These are short range cell towers (range is generally only a  few city blocks), and they are usually within a mile of each other.  The area they service is limited to about half of that.

They support efficient 5G data transmission.  Essentially, 5G is very fast but current cell towers are spaced several miles apart.  In urban areas, the number of users is very large per tower.  When I first got a 5G phone years ago, I liked the data speed.  But I lived west of Orlando, where the population was not as dense.  When I would be in the Orlando downtown area, I would see very bad bandwidth.. sometimes under 200K per second.

By using these new, smaller range towers, the number of users per tower is much lower making more bandwidth available per user.  This makes the higher bandwidth capacity of 5G available even in areas of high user volume.

While this document is a catalog from only one manufacturer I chose at random, it show the various types of towers which can be installed.  Some look like towers, and others blend in to existing structures, and the last one is the best example I have seen of invisible functionality.  You can probably identify similar towers in your area if you are near a populated city.

—— TL;DR —–

A note on 5G as your home internet: I recently switched to T-Mobile for my cell phone, who offered me a 5G home modem.  I decided to try it.  I currently have a cable modem service which can download at speeds of 500Mb, so I considered the 5G a modem to be a long shot in terms of being a better value.

Sadly, the 5G modem at my house could not get beyond 5Mb on the speed test.  The closest cell tower to my house is 3 miles away.  The area I live in is growing rapidly (like all of Florida), but there are no short range 5G towers in the city where I live.  I returned the modem to T-Mobile and kept my existing service, but I would reconsider it again after one of these short range towers is installed in range of my house.

 

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Technology.Networking, Technology.Thoughts