Walk into any Verizon or T-Mobile store this month and you'll see the same pitch: 5G home internet for forty or fifty bucks a month, no contract, no cable guy, no nonsense.
You plug it into a wall outlet near a window.
Around week three, your evening speeds start sagging.
Netflix buffers at 8 p.m. but flies at 8 a.m.
Fixed wireless runs on the same cellular capacity as the phone in your pocket, and carriers deliberately sell home internet to a limited slice of each tower's bandwidth.
When that slice fills, everyone on it shares the squeeze.
The fine print calls this "network management." Engineers call it deprioritization, and home internet customers usually sit near the bottom of the queue behind phone subscribers.
There's a second layer most buyers never hear about.
Carriers use location data from the gateway itself to decide what speed tier you're eligible for.
Move the device to a different room, a different floor, sometimes even a different window, and your account can get flagged for "address verification," throttled, or quietly booted.
Reddit threads are full of people who watched their speeds collapse after rearranging furniture.
Most carriers hand out rebranded gateways built by a handful of OEMs, and the spec sheets conveniently omit which 5G bands the device actually locks onto.
If your tower broadcasts mid-band (the fast stuff) and your gateway prefers low-band (the far-reaching but slow stuff), you'll get a stable 60 Mbps forever and never know why.
The fix is usually a window mount, a second-floor placement, or in some cases a different gateway model entirely, but nobody at the call center will volunteer that.
Cable and fiber providers fought municipal broadband for years, then watched fixed wireless eat their low-end customers.
Their response wasn't to compete on price.
It was to raise the price of the bundle and let the wireless carriers absorb the customers they didn't want anyway.
Meanwhile, carriers treat 5G home internet as a capacity sponge: sell it cheap where towers are idle, throttle it hard where they're not.
If you live within a mile of a mid-band tower, have few neighbors, and mainly stream, it can genuinely beat cable on price.
If you're in an apartment complex or a dense suburb, you're renting a lottery ticket.
Buy the trial period, test at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday, and read the network management clause before you cancel your old provider.
The honest take: fixed wireless is a real product with a real ceiling, and the ceiling is set by a spreadsheet you'll never see.
Final Thoughts
The speed test on day thirty is the truth.