5G home internet vs. cable vs. fiber: which should you actually get?

Limitations & caveats

• The fiber and cable rows come from the FCC’s measurement panel, not from your street. In the Thirteenth report fiber tiers were generally symmetric while technologies with less capacity allocate download over upload at ratios typically between 5:1 and 10:1; advertised upload averaged 528 Mbps on fiber against 16.6 Mbps on cable and 9.5 Mbps on DSL; idle latency taken by technology and advertised download speed ran 8 to 14 ms on fiber, 13 to 22 ms on cable and 20 to 61 ms on DSL; and fiber had the lowest packet loss. Those figures describe a national panel in a September–October 2022 window.
• The 5G home internet column is not measured by that program. No FCC Measuring Broadband America fixed report has ever included a fixed-wireless or 5G home ISP — all 13 configurations in the latest edition are DSL, cable or fiber — so the download, upload, jitter and peak-hour cells for 5G home rest on one carrier’s own published ranges and on the general network-management terms cited here, not on an independent measurement. The latency cell is the exception: NetForecast, an independent measurement firm, reported a median round trip of 81.4 ms for the 5G fixed-wireless providers against 56.8 ms for the cable providers in Report NFR5148, from 55 participants in 29 states whose probes were cabled to the ISP gateway between December 2022 and May 2023. Fiber was not in that panel, jitter was not among its published results, and the medians are by network type rather than per ISP — the same report describes lower per-provider medians without reconciling the two. It is a 2023 snapshot; nothing more recent is cited here.
• The Verizon material is one carrier’s disclosure for its own service, read on the last-checked date, and carrier terms change without notice. It supports three specific things: that band decides the ceiling (mid-band typical download 25 to 85 Mbps against 85 to 300 Mbps on high-band or mmWave for the same plan family), that the network-management asterisk is a congestion-time deprioritization for heavy users rather than an overage fee, and that the service is tied to the qualified service address you registered. T-Mobile’s and AT&T’s equivalent disclosures could not be read on that date.
• The price, renter-friendliness and consistency-guarantee rows are qualitative technology characterizations, not a ranking of providers and not backed by a pricing dataset. This site does not publish “best provider” claims without a documented methodology.
• Weather and outage behavior is not sourced here. The comparative claim that fiber plant is the most weather-indifferent, and the claim about running a gateway off a battery in a blackout, carry no citation on this page.
• Availability comes first and is address-specific. FCC map entries are provider-submitted filings of where a provider says it is able to serve, and Verizon’s own agreement states it cannot guarantee service will be available at your address even after an order is accepted. Nothing here tells you what you can order or what it will do at your home.