Three claims 5G will end fixed-line home broadband

Three CEO David Dyson with arms folded

The CEO of Three UK has claimed that 5G will offer home broadband good enough for people to fully ditch copper and fibre connections.

Dave Dyson, who has been at the helm of the mobile giant since 2011, said there would be enough capacity on 5G to cope with demand and result in households saving money by ending their fixed-line contracts.

Speaking to BBC News, Dyson predicted that customers will use 13 times as much mobile data in 2025 as they do today.

"Maybe not for the whole country, but certainly a significant majority of the country, I strongly believe 5G can offer a good enough home broadband experience for people to effectively ditch their copper or fibre connection," said Dyson.

"The challenge in terms of why we can't do that today is that the mobile networks don't have the capacity with 3G or 4G. 5G changes all of that."

Although it's not likely to happen any time soon, 5G is said to offer download speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second or even 20Gbps and is predicted to be the technology to accelerate IoT. However, most handsets are still not capable of pushing 4G speeds to their limits and this has put networks under pressure to convince the public.

But Three is making the case that 5G will offer a "genuine alternative" to fixed line services.

"Fibre-to-the-home for the small number of customers who value it and need it will probably provide a faster speed," Mr Dyson added. "But I think for the majority of people, 5G will be a genuine alternative.

"It's still quite unclear to me, as I'm sure it is to many people, what is going to be the price of all these fibre-to-the-home deployments when it actually arrives. It's expensive to dig up roads. It takes a lot of time and money. It's much cheaper and quicker to provide that connectivity via a wireless connection."

Bobby Hellard

Bobby Hellard is ITPro's Reviews Editor and has worked on CloudPro and ChannelPro since 2018. In his time at ITPro, Bobby has covered stories for all the major technology companies, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook, and regularly attends industry-leading events such as AWS Re:Invent and Google Cloud Next.

Bobby mainly covers hardware reviews, but you will also recognise him as the face of many of our video reviews of laptops and smartphones.