In most situations, these have been replaced by land lines for television and most communications, and the great big repeaters across the countryside have been supplanted by cell repeaters which also carry Wi-Fi and even take up the job of repeating FM radio these days.
Thus, the question remains. Do you need an antenna installed in 2021?
New applications for ancient technology?
Do you need to search for “nbn cabling contractors”? Are there practical applications for this in the 21st century? Well, that depends entirely on a couple factors. First, if you live any significant distance out into the countryside, for the time being, you may still be facing difficulties when it comes to getting decent Internet.
People dwelling out in the country and wilderness are no longer facing a need for dial-up for their Internet, but the speeds are still kind of garbage in far-removed places. It’s not so much that your bandwidth is limited, you just don’t have the bandwidth per unit to really do things like stream Netflix. This will change in the next decade or two, but for the time being, if you want to watch shows, you may still be beholden to broadcasts. Sure, you could probably get basic cable, but it will be through some Podunk subsidiary service, and it will be pretty awful.
However, while traditional “rabbit ears” are no longer a thing, with the UHF and VHF frequencies being shut down, digital broadcasts are a different story. Believe it or not, digital antenna broadcasts provide a great number of channels, some of which are the ones available on cable. These include things like cartoon network, Nickelodeon, hub, etc. for your kids as well as sci-fi, and various drama and news channels for adults.
In this situation, searching for “antenna installers near me” is still a very viable and necessary thing.
The future of 6G Internet?
In the next couple decades, when 6G rolls around, it will come in two forms. It will come in the form of fiber optic cable being dropped at doorsteps, and this will be within suburbs and urban areas. In the other case, it will be an extremely wide-band, high-frequency Wi-Fi signal transmitted across the wilderness. Transponders and repeaters will be installed even out in the far reaches, and will also use tricks like bouncing off of the stratosphere to get even better reach.
People out in remote areas will need antennas for this 6G Internet, and these antennas will probably be based off of the same technology that you will use right now for your digital television reception. Digital television won’t be around for long, it’s a short-lived stopgap technology, and its frequencies will give way to a future wide-range Wi-Fi system. There will be a time not far in the future where you will be able to access high-speed Internet from the literal tops of mountains out in the wilderness. That’ll be pretty darn cool.