u/AudioHTIT

An interesting option for those having difficulty with subwoofer placement (no price announced).

I’ve had Verizon 5G Home Internet (Home Plus) about two years now, and am generally pleased with it. To get this out of the way, I’m in a rural area and there are no wired options (though we used to have a land line). Before 5G we had Starlink, and before that fixed wireless. I also don't know of any providers besides Verizon whose 5G services are as fast in my area.

I first considered 5G Home when walking outside my iPhone showed 5Guw, and I could get about 500/50 on SpeedTest, when I upgraded to an iPhone 16P, I bit on the 30 day free trial they were offering. I put the 5G gateway in bypass mode and connected it to my UniFi UDM-SE router’s secondary WAN port, I could then run either Starlink or 5G as Primary, Failover, or some percentage of load balancing. When the 5G was as good or better than Starlink, for less than half the price, I kept it and shutdown Starlink (though it’s still mounted and can be easily reactivated).

I pretty consistently get 310–335 Mbps down and 15–30 up. I have my gateway at the top of the network closet on the second floor. The speed measurements come from the ‘ISP Speed Test’ on the router, and are consistent with what I get from a wired client, or indoor WiFi near an AP. I consider this very respectable and is similar to what I was getting with Starlink before I switched, it’s worlds ahead of the 10/3 fixed wireless I had for many years before that.

So, what’s determining my 5G Home speed? These seem likely possibilities:

• Signal strength & quality—I know there are different levels and types of 5G (like uw), but don’t know the details, it seems my strength is decent, but ultimately is this the most determining factor? Today my iPhone got 870/30 Mbps at the gateway location, and a little better outside (both show 5Guw).
• Plan—I see my Plus plan speed peaks go over 400 Mbps, but then they get pulled back (throttled?) to around 325, is my plan doing this? Would the ‘Ultimate’ plan give me better speeds?
• Gateway and placement—As mentioned I have the ‘Cube’ gateway (MODEL/SKU: ASK-NCM1100E-MOCK), could a different model give better performance? Though the placement seems pretty good, something with better, or external antennas could possibly do better?

Though our current speed meets our needs, both my wife and I use the network frequently, she has regular high profile video meetings, large file downloads/uploads, and we both like things to be as snappy as possible. When my 5G startup price expires I’d consider a different plan, and if there are other changes that might help (gateway/hardware) I’d consider that too. I guess I’m looking for a better understanding of what Verizon 5G Home Internet is capable of, and if I can do anything to improve what I have?