> mandate electricity and water as well as telephone line as standard. I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as standard as well

Electricity and water was mandated at the time the government mostly did right by the people and wasn't yet (fully) captured by corporate interests. By the time the internet arrived this was no longer the case.

If people actually read history books we'd make much better decisions as a society.

No. Water and electricity were not mandated in a magical past where the government was awesome. The government has been captured by corporations and special interests forever. The level of corruption in the 1800s was astronomical compared to today.

People fought for those rights. Often literally. And they still don't exist in some places.

Arkansas just passed a law that you need a working roof, electricity, heat and water, in 2021.

So no. Sitting around lamenting a past that never existed won't get us anywhere.

Glad to hear that Arkansas now has working roofs, electricity, heat, and water. Must've been weird before 2021.

Oh yah I remember that time when government was so captured by corporations that they forced the politicians to institute a 90% tax on incomes above $3 million

I don’t think that an awareness of the past is suggested because the past was great. I think it’s because seemingly good ideas weren’t, so it’s a chance to avoid repeating mistakes.

I had packet loss on my DOCSIS connection for years, on-and-off. The upstream speed would also regularly drop below a megabit. It became a problem for remote work.

I complained regularly, and always had "techs" come out. They would usually claim it was my splitter or my modem. I suggested they go outside and test the line from the street. They'd then confirm the loss was present on the line outside, then escalate it to the "outside guys" (plant or whatever.) It would be fixed for a month or two, then come back.

Eventually I was able to get the HOA to allow fiber into the neighborhood. Cable is NOT reliable.

> Eventually I was able to get the HOA to allow fiber into the neighborhood.

Crazy that you needed someone's permission to get fiber.

It's fairly involved in an older neighbourhood if the utilities are buried... they installed it in mine a couple years ago, and it involved months of contractors and trucks in the neighbourhood marking utility right-of-ways and hydrovaccing holes in everyone's front yards.

Yep, it was this exactly. 40+ year old neighborhood with buried electric, gas, water, telco. They had to dig up yards, do horizontal drilling under some roads, etc.

They just rip up the roads here. And then a couple months later another company does the same for their fiber because we can't have proper shared utilities anymore.

Yeah, here in the US there are geographically tiny pockets in a few major cities that have actual fiber. Most of the country, including a shocking number of dense urban areas outside the east coast, has zero fiber penetration. Of our two telephone monopolies, one installed fiber for 10 years and quit (the East Coast one), and the other basically never installed fiber to the home.

So anyway, outside that lucky group we all use cable only because the alternative is, in many places, 6Mbps ADSL on aging and flaky copper wires. Or potentially 12Mbps… VDSL? AT&T branded that as U-Verse for a while. But basically they ceded the market to the cable companies.

This talking point may be a bit outdated now... I'm in a small suburban area in the southeast with 5Gb fiber available from AT&T. Around 500k in my municipal area (50k in the city proper).

Idk but I’m still waiting for AT&T to get off their butts, as is most of my county. And this is a nearly fully urbanized county, basically no rural areas here at all, and all the cities touch.

AT&T is allergic to capex and even if they changed their mind recently they waited an unforgivably long time (20 years!) to start. They and their predecessors were happy to take all those sweet subsidies for doing so in the 90s though.

You're probably just in one of those "geographically tiny pockets in a few major cities."

I live in a place that’s rather difficult to serve and I’m just past the range where the full 24 Mbps ADSL2 speed is available so I get 20 Mbps. Once in a while my telco has infrastructure problems, it uses to be common that there would be lightning or power outages and it wouldn’t come back until they did some kind of manual reset, I talked w/ them and the PUC about it and then it seemed like they set it up so it would do an automated reset. The techs tell me if I lived very close to the node they could set me up with much faster VDSL.

> I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as standard as well.

The incumbents have been lobbying against this heavily, winning state laws banning municipalities from setting up their own fiber in some places.

Why should optical fiber be standard? I want reliable, speedy network connectivity. It’s up to my network provider to determine the best means to do that. I don’t care if it’s tin can and string if it provides the service I need.

> Why should optical fiber be standard? I want reliable, speedy network connectivity.

The second sentence answers the question.

> It’s up to my network provider to determine the best means to do that. I don’t care if it’s tin can and string if it provides the service I need.

You assume that your network provider wants to provide "reliable, speedy network connectivity" and not "maximize profits with the smallest possible outlay".

Given they already have a bunch 'legacy' infrastructure, they're going to try to milk that existing plant as much as possible before shelling out another dime on anything new. That is not a recipe for "reliable, speedy network connectivity".

So municipal networks are a classic example of a natural monopoly, where it's more efficient to just have a single utility network vs redundant infrastructure.

Fiber is good for this because it's both cheap and effectively future proof vs consumer needs. Also, thanks to how IP works, a municipality can build out the physical network, then offer competitive options among ISPs delivering service on it if they like.

This generally results in much better service for consumers at lower cost, which is why Comcast, Century Link, etc, have been doing all the political maneuvering they can to pre-empt voters from choosing that path.

Fiber is cheaper, faster, and far more reliable. You've already constrained the problem such that fiber is the only possible solution, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Mostly because we're pushing the limits of long-range copper to offer currently-standard bandwidth levels, where as fiber is just getting started (you can go to 100Gbit on the same fiber by just swapping the optics at either end).

Also deploying copper is much more expensive than dirt cheap fiber optic

> the one thing most important with Internet or WiFi isn't Speed, bandwidth or latency. It is reliability! It is far better to have a reliable slow 6Mbps ADSL connect than a 1Gbps Cable that has connection constantly dropping off.

Please don't assume everyone's usecase is the same as yours. I would pay dearly to have an unreliable but FAST connection just to get away from my 6Mbps DSL.

Isn't this particular failure mode applicable to any TDMA technology (of which even GPON fiber is one) when the contention ratios become too high?

The issue is that the ISP selling services beyond what that physical network segment can provide, and it being effectively legal to sell something and not deliver it if you're a big enough corporation and only scam consumers.

At the present moment I live in a place in NYC without fiber. Manhattan row townhomes are notoriously hard for Verizon to install FiOS in. I chose 5G over DOCSIS simply because of upload speeds.

T-Mobile (both TMHI and Calyx Sprout SIM) has 40-75 Mbps uploads versus 20-35 on Spectrum.

It also helps that I use a L2TP VPN to a BGP VPS to get myself a public IPv4, otherwise I'd have Spectrum for no CGNAT.

Yes, I'd much rather have fiber with symmetrical speeds and low latency. Heck, if Spectrum had high split or even mid split I'd have that.

Cable hyped their "10G" upgrades but it's basically vaporware while non-cable ISPs actually showed up with fiber and/or 5G. Trump's tariffs are also punishing cable ISPs.

YMMV and this probably heavily depends on the provider and location, but in my experience, at multiple locations, cable is rock solid, generally delivering close to advertised speed.

Sure, they might be a short (<1h) outage once or twice per year, but even fiber infrastructure is not immune to this.

Well... We had a ton of issues with DOCSIS until a few years ago, when they built fiber to the nearby pole, and the cable is just a few meters inside the house to the street. Before it used to break all the time.

Yeah, they will eventually bring fiber to the apartment. This is Germany anyhow, it will happen in the next 10-30 years.

interesting the article mentions his speeds dropped. I wonder if someone at support knows this but knows there's nothing they can really do to fix the issues?

"I wonder why we cant mandate Optical Fibre as standard as well"

Lobbying by big ISPs.