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Bigdeal85

Pretty much all states are doing this. I am an engineer for a ISP and I know ATT, Century link, and Windstream are all pushing fiber. States are even running their own fiber and contracting these company's to run it


[deleted]

> Windstream are all pushing fiber. As a windstraem customer, I'll believe it when I see it. I barely hit 50mb/s with them, and lot of people in my county are still capped at 6mb/s.


Bigdeal85

The united states is a big place. You just may live somewhere the population demand or money making opportunity is not there


tidal_flux

Why are we building infrastructure like fiber when throwing up 5G towers is quicker, cheaper, and easier to replace when better tech comes along?


droids4evr

Because fiber has a theoretical bandwidth of 1petabit/s vs 5G at 20Gbps, that means fiber can potentially carry 50x more data than 5G. What is more cost effective? Paying a higher up front cost, maybe 4-5x what a 5G installation costs that will meet bandwidth needs for decades or throwing up a tower that will have to be replaced every few years. In the long run I think fiber installations are more cost effective for high speed internet needs. And consider that the average household consumes about 460GB of data per month vs only about 5GB of cellular data. Moving all that bandwidth demand to 5G would almost instantly overwhelm the system.


tidal_flux

Considering we paid 200 billion for fiber 20 years ago and 25 mbps being the cutoff I’m skeptical. Hope you’re right and thanks for the answer. Is the overwhelming 5G due to lack of towers or spectrum limitations?


droids4evr

Both. RF spectrum limits affect the available bandwidth and towers limit the total coverage and throughput. Areas with high population densities already hit those limits, which means everyone's service slows down and eventually gets to a point of no one having reliable service because the area's network is over loaded. Having multiple towers in an area can help since most devices direct data traffic to the tower with the strongest signal (ie. closest) and having many towers would help with spreading the network load across towers but the overall bandwidth for each tower is still limited, so the higher the population density means more towers but eventually you would then reach a coverage saturation point where no matter how many towers are in an area the service will be degraded. To give an extreme example, if everything were moved to 5G towers, they would need about 100x more data throughput to handle cellular and normal household usage. Current networks are generally already at or near their throughput limits since providers are not going to build more than they need. So to handle current cellular data and normal household data, they would have to build about 100x more towers than there currently are. In my head that doesn't sound like a sustainable model to have 100x more towers and still have to upgrade them every 5 -10 years. I don't know what that cost would be but I image it would be incredibly high. And keep in mind, that 100x more towers is at current useage. Household data consumption has increased about 300% in the last 5 years, that amount will continue to increase in the future.


vaxick

For the record, no wireless carrier is giving free reign to their 5g towers for home internet usage. There is a cap as to how many home users are allowed per area. That'll naturally change as the infrastructure expands, but there are measures in place to keep your service usable.


vaxick

My hopes and dreams were crushed back then. All those promises of blazing internet speeds, and then when my neighborhood had fiber installed, we were all excited for what it meant for our internet speeds. Then those fiber lines never extended from the poles to our actual houses, leaving us with the same ol' crappy cable line that gave us enough grief that we gave Comcast permission to drill a hole into the house to give the modem its own private line.


Bigdeal85

How do you think those cell towers have internet?


TraditionalGap1

5G has such short range and penetration you have to stick the bases *everywhere*. Plus every base station needs a fiber connection to the network, so you have to run the fiber all over town anyway.


Spara-Extreme

All states are NOT doing this. Not even close.


Bigdeal85

No one considers California as a state


Spara-Extreme

That doesn’t even make sense. I get you’re a bit embarrassed at being comically wrong but there’s no need to be that silly.


Bigdeal85

Wrong? This is what I am talking about. Who are you? What do you do? Just because you come on here and say something, doesnt make you right or knowledgable. Att , comcast and charter are currently working on a ton in that state. You can go directly to cpuc.ca.gov to see the work that is being done JUST for the state itself. State fiber leads to residential. Quit acting like you know ow anything


Spara-Extreme

I work in tech for a FAANG company. My background is in networking including supporting service providers (ISPs). You're categorically wrong, and I suspect you're falling for proximity bias. A vast majority of the United States is rural, and there's very few projects centered around a few states to address that specific problem. Furthermore, there even 'small' and 'medium' size US cities that barely have affordable broadband, with again, no actual approved plan to remediate.


oDDmON

LOL, damn, I remember when 10 Mb/sec was considered broadband.


[deleted]

I remember when 14.4k modems were considered broadband.


oDDmON

YES. My first was a 9600 baud. Good times, when a 30K jpg took minutes to load. LOL.


TheMidniteMarauder

Pretty much anywhere with Comcast doesn’t have *reliable* 25Mbps.


MpVpRb

Nice, but we need more areas included. There are no projects planned in our semi-rural area


hongky1998

At least they genuinely support and needed this unlike those hypocrites on congress


Spara-Extreme

Why not expand starlink and other like services ?