5G: THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH!

Vol 39: Honey, I Cut the Cord (how the Verizon 5G FWA service compares with a traditional broadband cable service)

03/15/2024 | 40 pages
Price: $1,095.00

SRG just completed its 39th 5G benchmark study. For this endeavor we collaborated with Accuver Americas and Spirent Communications to conduct an independent benchmark study of the Verizon 5G FWA service and how it compares with our Mediacom Xtream 1 Gbps broadband cable service.

Highlights of the Report include the following:

Our Thanks. We did this study in collaboration with Accuver Americas (XCAL-M and XCAP) and Spirent Communications (Umetrix Data). SRG is responsible for the data collection and all analysis and commentary provided in this report.

We Cut the Cord. In mid-December we signed up for the Verizon 5G home Internet service as paying subscribers and simultaneously removed our Mediacom Xtream service as the primary means of Internet access,. We have so far retained the Mediacom 1 Gbps service, but only to occasionally test it against our Verizon service, which we will continue to use as our primary means of Internet access. Our network consists of one access point and two Wi-Fi extender nodes.

Our Methodology. We used a combination of XCAL-M, Wireshark, and Task Manager to measure our broadband consumption with full buffer data transfers and with more typical applications, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, email, YouTube TV, and web browsing. In addition to analyzing actual bandwidth versus available bandwidth, we also evaluated latency and packet loss, using Umetrix Data to generate continuous 1 Mbps and 5 Mbps data streams.

300 Mbps is Enough. The Verizon service is artificially limited to 300 Mbps in the downlink – we can get up to 1 Gbps over cellular – but it is sufficient for most applications, most of the time. Having a 1 Gbps Internet connection is overkill unless there are multiple high bandwidth applications running in parallel. Hint, most applications do not generate high bandwidth.

20 Mbps isn’t enough. The Verizon service is artificially limited to 20 Mbps in the uplink. For some applications, it is sufficient but it doesn’t take much to use this much bandwidth. We provide what we think is a convincing argument for Verizon to delver unlimited speeds in the uplink, even if it continues to promise speeds up to 20 Mbps.

Latency was reasonably good. With one critical exception, the one-way downlink / uplink latency was reasonably good with the Verizon 5G FWA service and not that much higher than our Mediacom service. Uplink latency in the presence of other uplink background traffic is a cause for concern.

Blame it on the Wi-Fi. We can attribute the issues we’ve had with the Verizon FWA service to the Wi-Fi portion of the network. Issues include high interference – something we think we’ve fixed – and device stupidity, or a device camping on an unusable Wi-Fi signal when cellular is present or using 2.4 GHz when 5 GHz is readily available. These later issues are the fault of the device. The aforementioned issue with uplink latency with other background traffic remains a critical issue that needs to be addressed (unrelated to the ability of 5G to provide a home Internet service).