5G home broadband vs full fibre: what you give up

If full fibre hasn't reached your street, or your landlord won't have a cable drilled through the wall, 5G home broadband starts to look like the obvious way round the problem. A box arrives in the post. You plug it in near a window, and you are online the same afternoon. No engineer, no appointment, no digging up the path.

It's a real option, and for plenty of households it is the right one. It isn't the like-for-like swap the adverts imply, though, and the differences sit in the small print rather than in the speed.

What is 5G home broadband?

It is a mobile signal doing a fixed line's job. Instead of a cable running to your house, a router with a SIM card in it picks up the mobile network from the nearest mast and shares that connection over wifi, exactly as any other router would. The industry name is fixed wireless access, meaning it is sold for one fixed address even though the technology underneath is mobile.

That distinction does a lot of work. Nothing has to be built to your property, which is why it can be running within a day. And nothing has been built to your property, which is why the guarantees are not the same ones.

Where it genuinely wins

• There is nothing to install. No engineer visit, no hole drilled through a wall, no waiting for a build to reach your side of the road. The kit is a router and a plug socket.
• Nobody has to give permission. A fixed fibre install means bringing a cable into the building, and in a flat or a rented house that needs the freeholder or landlord to agree in writing. A refusal can stall a full fibre order indefinitely, with no appeal worth having. A router that needs a plug asks nobody.
• It moves when you do. The router goes in a box and travels with you, which is genuinely useful if you expect to move within the year. The signal at the new address is its own question, but there is no install to rebook and no contract stranded at the old house.
• It covers a gap. If full fibre is being built near you but cannot connect you yet, a short commitment bridges the wait rather than committing you to years of something slower.

Do the same rules protect you?

Not all of them, and this is the part worth reading twice. Two protections people reasonably assume come with any broadband service are written for fixed lines, and they do not stretch to a mobile one.

The first is speed. Ofcom's broadband speeds codes of practice commit the providers that sign up to giving you a realistic speed estimate before you order, a minimum guaranteed speed, and the right to leave without penalty if your line never reaches it and they cannot put it right. Those codes cover fixed access broadband. They do not cover mobile broadband, and the stated reason is the honest one: what a mobile connection delivers depends on where you are, how far you sit from the transmitter, and how many other people are using the same spot.

The second is compensation. The automatic compensation scheme pays out without you having to ask when a fault takes too long to fix, an engineer misses an appointment, or a service starts later than promised. It applies to residential fixed broadband and landline products. Mobile broadband is not in it.

Neither point makes 5G home broadband a bad product. They do mean that when it underperforms, your remedy is whatever the contract happens to offer, rather than a scheme sitting above the contract that the provider has to honour anyway. That is a real difference in position. It is also never on the advert.

Can you switch away from it easily?

Usually yes, and this is one place the answer has quietly got better. One Touch Switch, the process where you only have to contact the provider you are joining and it arranges the rest, was widely assumed to be a fixed-line-only arrangement that wireless services sat outside.

TOTSCo, which runs the switching hub the industry uses, clarified that the dividing line is not the technology but the way the service is sold. A mains-powered router meant to stay at one address counts as a service provided at a fixed location and is in scope, whatever kind of signal reaches it. A battery-powered pocket device you carry around is not.

So a home 5G service should switch much the way a fibre one does, while a dongle is a mobile contract you cancel yourself. Our guide on how switching actually works covers the steps and the timings either way.

The speed question, answered honestly

The number on the advert is the wrong thing to compare. A mobile connection is shared capacity: the mast serving your router is the same mast serving every phone around it, so what arrives at your house moves with the time of day and with how busy that spot is. A fibre line running into your home is not shared in the same way, and it is steadier as a result.

Upload is where the gap tends to show, and upload is what video calls, cloud backups and working from home lean on hardest. Working out your own floor is more useful than comparing headline figures, and our guide on what broadband speed you actually need is built for exactly that.

The other half of this is worth saying plainly. For a household that streams, browses and takes a few calls, a good 5G connection is often more than enough, and raw speed is rarely why anyone regrets one. Signal is. A router two rooms from the window it needs, or a mast that gets busy every evening, will spoil a service that looked fine on paper.

Who should pick which

5G home broadband earns its place when a fixed line is unavailable, blocked by somebody else's permission, or not worth committing to because you won't be there long. Full fibre wins when you can get it and expect to stay put: a dedicated line into your home, a minimum speed somebody is accountable for, and the compensation scheme sitting behind both. On the networks we track it is frequently the cheaper of the two as well, once you compare like for like, which tends to surprise people who assume wireless must be the budget option.

Your own address is the only test that settles it. Coverage is street by street on both sides, and no article can tell you what reaches your door. So start with what is actually available where you live, then put the real options next to each other in the comparison table. If a full fibre network can connect you today, that is usually the end of the argument. If it can't, 5G beats staying on something slow out of habit.

Frequently asked questions

Is 5G home broadband the same as mobile broadband?

Not quite, and the difference matters more than it sounds. A home service is mains powered and sold for one address, which the industry calls fixed wireless access. A pocket device with a battery is mobile broadband. Regulators draw the line at whether the service is provided at a fixed location rather than at the technology behind it.

Does 5G home broadband come with a minimum guaranteed speed?

Not under Ofcom's broadband speeds codes of practice, which cover fixed access broadband rather than mobile. Whatever you are promised comes from the contract itself, so it is worth reading what the provider actually commits to and what it offers if that is not met.

Can I claim automatic compensation if it goes down?

No. The automatic compensation scheme applies to residential fixed broadband and landline services, so a mobile-based home service sits outside it. Your remedy is whatever the contract gives you, which usually means asking for a credit rather than being paid one without asking.

Should I take it while waiting for full fibre?

That is one of the better reasons to take it. A short or rolling commitment covers the gap without locking you out of ordering fibre later. Check your address first, because a network can be building on your street for months before it can actually connect you.