I’ve been using 5G Home Internet for well over a year now, and honestly, I love it. For my lifestyle and day-to-day Internet habits, it has hit the sweet spot between performance, convenience, and simplicity. If you’ve ever wondered whether 5G Internet is a realistic alternative to cable or fibre for your home, I’m going to share the details and my experience in this blog post.

Understanding the tech: Cellular vs. Wi-Fi

Before talking about why 5G works so well for me, it helps to clear up a common misconception: your phone’s “G” (4G, 5G, etc.) is not the same thing as your home Wi-Fi. They work together, but they’re completely different technologies:

• Cellular (e.g., 4G, 5G) travels long distances, from your home to the nearest cell tower, sometimes several kilometres away.
• Wi-Fi (e.g., Wi-Fi 6, 6E, 7) travels very short distances, usually just a few meters between your devices and your home router.

Because of this, modern Wi-Fi is blazing fast. With Wi-Fi 6 and 7, actual speeds in the gigabit range are common. Even the best 4G and many 5G cellular connections top out well below that, depending on your provider, tower conditions, and congestion. My Wi-Fi 7 provides 2–5 Gbps, while my 5G provides 400–900 Mbps (= 0.4–0.9 Gbps).

Traditionally, home internet worked like this:

• Your home devices connect to your Wi-Fi router using Wi-Fi
• Your Wi-Fi router connects to the Internet through a cable (fibre, coaxial cable, or phone line)

The problem with cables

Cables get the job done, but they come with baggage. They’re expensive to maintain, they require physical infrastructure, and sometimes they enter your home in inconvenient places. For example, the coaxial connection in my house is in a frustratingly awkward spot – getting a router wired up properly would mean running cables through 4 walls or rearranging my entire setup.

And then there’s the maintenance aspect. Weather damage, aging infrastructure, and installation complexity all add a layer of hassle. For years we’ve heard the promise that cellular networks would eventually take over the “last mile” of home internet, but it never really panned out… at least not with 4G.

Enter 5G: The game changer

For me, everything changed last summer. Rogers had finally expanded and upgraded their local infrastructure enough to support 5G Home Internet in my area. After crawling along with slow DSL for years because I didn’t want to deal with the issues of getting coaxial Internet in my house, I jumped at the chance. Was I going to get fibre-level speeds? No. But did I need them? Also no.

Matching the tech to actual needs

Some households stream multiple 4K movies at once, game online across several consoles, run smart home devices in every corner, and have a dozen people jumping on video calls. For that kind of usage, fibre or high-end coaxial makes more sense.

But my needs are much simpler:

• Work: Microsoft Teams, O365, browser-based SaaS tools, SSH access to cloud server infrastructure
• Personal use: web browsing, social media, YouTube, Google Home
• No TV, no heavy streaming setup, no online gaming

That’s it.

For that kind of workload, 5G home internet is more than enough, and then some. I get a stable connection, smooth video calls, and fast speeds for everything I do. And I get all of that without dealing with cable routing, installation appointments, or legacy infrastructure.

The convenience factor

This is the part that I value the most! Plug in a wireless router with built-in 5G cellular anywhere in your home, and you’re done. No technician. No cables. No drilling. The entire connection to the outside world is wireless. Rogers shipped me a router, I plugged it into power, connected my computers and other devices to it using Wi-Fi and they all had 5G Internet immediately.

If I decide that I want to move my router to a different room? Unplug it. Carry it over. Plug it back in. Done.

Final thoughts

5G home internet is truly wireless. It may not be perfect for everyone, especially heavy-duty households with extreme bandwidth demands. But for tech professionals like me, as well as remote workers, casual streamers, and many other everyday users, it hits an incredible balance between performance and convenience.