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As someone who just went though a 3 month battle is one of the major ISP's in the UK to get a family members property connected I can suggest 1 big thing that many customers will notice a differnce between LTE and 5G. Gaming. First games are getting huge, so the extra speed is always a bonus for getting the title downloaded faster.

At the family members property inquestion their old fixed line boardband connection was 20meg (That was the fastest they could get on VDSL2 because of line quality and distance to the street cab - no G.Fast and no current plans for Openreach fibre nor OFNL), with two teenage kids in the house with current gen consoles each and the parents also wanting to stream on demand video and on of the parents working from home a few days a week, their connection would get overwhelmed all the time.

"Thankfully", their street is on the Virgin Media network however its only recently been added to the network and the property has a shared drive so the address was coming up as that VM was not avalable at the address even though there was a clear run of grass from the cable duct to the house.

3 months later we finally got VM to connect the house and now they have 500meg (did a cost benifit on the speed needed and opted for 500 over a gig cause for they also inisted on a phone line & calls, which was gonna add another £25 p/m on the bill for a gig and they should be fine with 500 - the kids are not contrubiting to the cost) and the kids love it and the parents like that the kids are not complaining about the net speed any more.

5G is rolling out in their area (Currently marked as avalable outdoors, weak indoors which I validated with a site visit), but had that been avaliable (and not over subscribed) it would have been a viable Home Boardband alt to their current fixed line providers as it would have provided the speeds the family required, a low latency so the kids can't complain while playing online and decent video calling for the WFM parent and saved the hassle of getting the property connected to the network (which I kind of expect to happen again once OpenReach finally plan the fibre build for their street, the current copper phone lines are underground not on telegraph poles and I'm not sure of the quality of the duct work that line runs though so it might be a PITA to get OpenReach - prob the reason the area is currently not on the plans) and would be cheaper per month than Virgin Media.

I used to use LTE for my home boardband for a while (was in temp accommodation helping with a family illness, landlord didn't want me putting in a fixed line and no 5G at the time), the speed was fine for me alone (about 100meg iirc, I just had to wait for big downloads), the kicker was the 100ms+ latency I was getting on LTE, which was a PITA esp playing first person shooters online. (EDIT: That and also being CGNAT'ed - not the end of the world, but gaming still preferes not being CGNAT'ed - but the shift to IPv6 _should_ fix that.) If all you can get is LTE its "ok", but I wouldn't recommend it if you have alt's such as 5G or (decent) fixedline.




LTE latency is fine for gaming. 20-30ms, very similar to DOCSIS cable broadband.

The problem isn't LTE, it's that the LTE tower you are/were connected to is congested, so latency starts rising.

The exact same thing happens on 5G, though there is more capacity & fewer users on it right now. Congestion is starting to build everywhere on 5G in the UK. I imagine in a year or twos time performance will be pretty average on 5G in most places.


Lte latency is ok for gaming, it's sometimes faster than aDSL. As you said, the problem occurs when congested, which in my experience is either always or when you are free to game (drawing parallels to traffic).

But to be absolutely fair, aDSL latency isn't good. On the same hardware, i went from 70-80 ms on aDSL to 10-15ms (in various games, not raw icmp) when i switched to fiber. Sure, for most games that isn't that much but try to do any kind of competitive gaming and you very quickly end up in situations where ping becomes an issue.




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