Maybe not yet - but 5g was built with the idea of making them cheap. It takes a couple years to design the cheap modems and then a few more years to get them in TVs, so they could well be coming in the near future yet - only time will tell. And the modem will also be your wifi so you can't really rip it off without losing other useful things.

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gruez 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>but 5g was built with the idea of making them cheap

For bandwidth, maybe. It's still going to add cost to the BOM. They'll have to recoup that somehow. Say a 5G modem costs $20 (random number). For it to actually make money, it'll need to be otherwise not connected to the internet, otherwise it can just use wifi instead. Out of 100 people, how many do you think won't connect it to the internet for privacy reasons? 1? 5? 10? Keep in mind, if they don't connect to the internet, they'll need to go out and get another device to watch netflix or whatever, so they're highly incentivized to. Say 10 out of 100 don't, and with this sneaky backdoor you now can sell ads to them. For that privilege, you paid $200 per disconnected TV, because for every disconnected TV with a 5G module, you need to have a 5G module in 9 other TVs that were already connected to the internet. How could you ever hope to recoup that expense?

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bluGill 15 hours ago | parent [-]

assume they are aiming for $1 in large quantites. I don't know thier number but that is closer. And the cost will be low because they are bulk buying excess data. They can send this at 3am when everyone is asleep so cell companies can give a deep discount.

again the above is the plan, reality often changes.

	▲	gruez 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The above pricing is just for the modem itself, not the data plan. There's no way you can get a cellular modem for $1.

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sfRattan 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you're planning on using the TV as a dumb display for another device, and are determined enough to physically remove a cellular modem, then the TV's own WiFi is not a useful thing either, even if integrated into the same chip.

	▲	bluGill 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The CPU, wifi, and modem are all in one in this future (think ESP32). That is the direction this is likely to move. You can't remove one without the rest. I suppose you could put your own CPU in and write software, but otherwise you are stuck.
	▲	hunter2_ 9 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		If you want the TV to be on your network (for casting or streaming or whatever) and you also want to filter that traffic (allowing connections only to the services you want to use) then you need it to be on your own network (wifi, if there's no ethernet port) and not on someone else's network (cellular).