this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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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.