389
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
389 points (99.5% liked)
Technology
58070 readers
3096 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The local exchange carriers (LECs) typically change from plain olds telephone system (POTS) to fiber at the neighborhood level. Coax carriers also.
Fiber to the neighborhood is already there. It's not hard to run a line across a neighborhood to connect whatever on either side.
The difficult part is getting from a neighborhood connection to each individual home. It's a flower pot install on each property, all connected together underground, and it can't fuck with gas, water, sewer, etc.
Seems like they could connect something wireless to the fiber to provide internet to the home.
The entire cellular network, particularly T-Mo 5G unlimited, would put it to shame. If one wants better then Starlink.
The way to do wireless would be to form a neighborhood ISP, put up a tower, then wireless P2P to each home. I've seen it in a few places. More common is citywide wifi.
That's called a WISP
It's also not hard to use that fibre connection to the neighbourhood to provide DSL. That's precisely what it's made for: Use that copper last mile and have whatever on the upstream side. And there's plenty of DSL hardware that doubles as POTS and/or ISDN hardware, you can upgrade the whole neighbourhood to "DSL available" by installing such a thing, connecting all the lines to it, and then remotely activating DSL when people sign up.
Over here they're actually moving away from that, opting for voip instead and using DSL over the whole frequency spectrum.
As soon as those decades old and severely degraded copper lines are replaced in all of those old neighborhoods where fiber is slowest to roll out, DSL can provide a higher cost and subpar service on a deprecated standard. That's exactly what we need with a surplus of capacity on modern hardware already deployed in the field.
We'll all have broadband in no time if they'd just listen to you.
Earthworks are expensive, doubly so if you need specialised techs because fibre isn't easy to install much less splice. If you get fibre to within 200-500m of the property G.Fast will deliver 100Mbit to 1Gbit, which is way faster than most people are willing to pay for. And that's old tech in fact most plans for FTTH are actually FTTF, that is, fibre only reaches the property border, then you get a copper cable from there using XG-FAST, a single-user DSL installation. Expect something on the order of 8Gbit/s. Which is an amount of speed most people's PCs can't even deal with, 1Gbit NICs are still the norm with 2.5G making inroads. Gigabit ethernet has been sufficient for the vast, vast, majority of people for a good 20 years now.
Things might be a bit different in the US because suburbia and those ludicrously sparse neighbourhoods, yep going directly to fibre at least to the property border probably makes sense there. But in the city? Provide fibre to a block, the rest of the infrastructure can be reused. It's not cheap to run fibre through apartment building hallways, either, and no running Ethernet on those copper lines is a much worse idea, ethernet can't deal gracefully with interference, crosstalk, and otherwise shoddy copper.