The banal failure of 5G home internet

5 July 2026

Hot take: the viability of home 5G internet in Australia has been destroyed by telcos deploying shithouse, cheap modems that will cause most customers to blame cellular connectivity rather than the garbage piece of equipment that Telstra or Vodafone sent them.

Back in 2013 Australia had an election and replaced its Labor government with the Liberals. Labor had started building out a National Broadband Network and one of the key parts of this plan was that the vast majority of urban residences and businesses would receive fibre to the premises (FTTP). The Liberals made the case that this was not good use of taxpayer dollars and altered the plan to a “multi-technology mix”, which included pressing into service much of the copper telephone wiring that Telstra had already given up maintaining to provide “fibre to the node” (FTTN). This was a scheme where you still use an ADSL-style modem but you only have to reach your nearest “node” rather than the exchange, so you can get higher speeds.

At the time I thought this was complete baloney. I still suspect it was. Politicians: what can you do?

However, I was wrong about one thing. I recall that one of the justifications for the multi-technology mix was that 5G services were going to increase and improve and there would be less need for fibre. I didn’t think much of this until a few years ago when, due to short-term living arrangements, I tried out a 5G mobile internet plan with Telstra. Honestly, I was pretty shocked. On a dinky portable modem I was getting solid hundreds of Mb/s down and tens up, at a cost competitive with many of the NBN fibre plans.

I live in an urban area with good 5G coverage from multiple providers and I later spent a couple of years using 5G internet seriously at home, even though I had a fibre NBN box sitting there. The NBN box wasn’t in a convenient room so it was nice that I could put the 5G router pretty much anywhere.

I started with Vodafone. The modem, a Nokia FastMile 5G, had an intermittent bug where it would stop servicing local DNS requests. The 5G connection was fine—ongoing TCP connections continued normally—but for regular web browsing it was dead. If I didn't power-cycle the router it would eventually recover by itself but this was unpredictable and could take hours.

I thought I would log on and change the DHCP settings to point clients at a different DNS server, like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8. No such luck—the web interface simply didn’t offer a custom DNS server for the DHCP service. This is table stakes configurability and it’s not there.

Then, I saw that I could disable the DHCP server entirely on the modem. I thought I would put a Raspberry Pi on the network to act as a replacement that could provide a different DNS server. I discovered that the WiFi/ethernet bridging on the modem doesn’t work properly and while Ethernet-connected peers could be assigned an address by my Pi, WiFi peers would never get one.

I parked that plan, and for a while I simply plugged in a second router and double-NATed. The second router was a more-or-less capable TP-Link that allowed me to configure DNS servers. It was inelegant but it worked for a while.

Then I had to contend with a different problem with the Nokia: it was frequently downgrading to non-5G connectivity and my speeds would reduce to a few Mb/s. The fix? Slightly rotate the router so it had weaker connectivity to the 5G, then rotate it back again. I'm quite serious. I had to wiggle it on the shelf for about 20 seconds and suddenly it would lock on to 5G again.

After a while I decided I was sick of this and I churned to Telstra 5G. I exchanged one set of problems for another.

When I had friends over for games we lost connectivity with each other. It couldn’t handle the load of multiple PCs using Steam, whether over WiFi or Ethernet. Around once a week the modem would simply drop its internet connection until I turned it off and on again. This failure mode became consistent enough that I scripted a Raspberry Pi with a WiFi-controlled power outlet to automatically detect when the internet broke and turn the modem off and on again.

There are better 5G home routers on the market. The trouble is, you’re not supposed to use them. Both Vodafone and Telstra require that you use exactly the provided device and it would be trivial for them to detect if you were using something else. This is very different from the NBN where you can plug in any Ethernet device that speaks DHCP and get online.

Nowadays I am back on the NBN fibre. The performance is good, and thanks to investing in a decent Ubiquiti router I’m no longer plagued by dodgy equipment issues. The fibre is still coming into an inconvenient room and I’ve accepted that I’m going to have to pay a tradie to move it somewhere better. So it goes.

By the way, it’s not just me who thinks the modems are worthless. Telstra has a bunch of scary copy saying that when you cancel the plan you must return the modem within N days according to their instructions or they will charge you lots of money. Many months have passed and they have never provided any instructions for how to return it. Not worth their time and money, apparently.

The whole thing is profoundly stupid. 5G coverage is quite good and getting better all the time. Infill is continuing so that there are smaller cells and more bandwidth available during peak. There’s a lot to like. You don’t need fibre installed in your building. If you’re a business that needs high availability you can sign up with two different 5G providers that use different cell towers. Yet, the whole thing becomes unworkable simply because the ISPs are cheapskates with their hardware. What a waste.

Serious Computer Business Blog by Thomas Karpiniec
Posts RSS, Atom