Originally Posted by
KRSW
MM wave is a joke. Your hand effectively blocks it. The walls and windows of your home block it. The windows of my car block it. Tree leaves block it. Unless you're in an area where people are on-foot, outdoors, in clear air, it doesn't make sense. Verizon's tried lighting up a few NFL stadiums with it and still can't cover an entire stadium with it.
Besides the obvious (more, smaller towers) I think the future lies in the past -- data compression. It's how we got more speed out of dial-up modems and with today's processors and algorithms we should be able to do it again.
Home internet would also make using fixed exterior antennas viable, so signal strength might not be as big of an issue with mmWave as it is when trying to use it on a phone. Of course, that would probably preclude self-installation by the end user.
Also, streaming video is already pretty heavily compressed. I'm not sure we can get much more out of that approach without significant degradation in quality.