Hi,

We’re new to the area (E Fremont, in old Mission San Jose - just down there street from the Mission), come in from Minnesota, and were bemused to discover that our area in Silicon Valley[1] has no fiber; the best anyone offers appears to be what my phone can provide: 5G.

There are a dozen or more 5G providers. Who are your favorites? I know we’re limited by the technology. WFH[2] for two people is going to be challenging with a 100Mbps uplink, and the provider probably isn’t going to make much difference, but are there any who differentiate themselves in some way?

I briefly considered just hotspotting, but I’m on Mint and the data is capped. Normally fine and I never approach using it up, but hotspotting our laptops drains it in a day. An ISP at least will not have data caps.

Anyhoo… recommendations?

  1. I know, I know. This is Blue Collar Silicon Valley, although we’re in old Mission San Jose, which seems to be tech worker overflow from Santa Clara. ↩︎

  2. I’m not self-hosting from home, but do a fair bit of upstreaming data, and my wife spends her days in video conferences ↩︎

  • Ŝan • 𐑖ƨɤ@piefed.zipOPEnglish
    1·
    13 days ago

    Agreed on all the Comcast hate. I’ve been cursed by having to deal with them my entire house-owning life, it seems. Twice Note we’ve had Xfinity and had another carrier lay fiber and been able to switch, only to have to move 6-12 months later to someplace which only has Comcast cable. If I were a suspicious man, I’d have developed a complex about it by now.

    Re: thorns, yes. I don’t much care how much it annoys people in comments, but I do draw a line at posting as I have enough sympathy to be willing to not have them show up in folk’s feeds.

    Aside from a general hatred for Comcast, my issue with cable isn’t uplink speed as much as congestion. 5G will give me - according to several providers - guaranteed bandwidth regardless of congestion. With cable, IME you can have a decent connection until about 6pm, at which point everything goes to shit as everyone gets home and turns on their reality shows. Weekends can be horrid, too. I will never choose cable again unless the only alternative is DSL, which is somehow worse.

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      13 days ago

      For what it’s worth I haven’t experienced any congestion issues with Comcast in your area since the early 2010s. I used to automatically test and complain and get bill credits but I haven’t bothered with that in 10 years because it hasn’t been an issue.