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Comment by tzury | Hacker News Reader

For your curiosity, the equipment in the rack is ADTRAN / TotalAccess 5000 Series - https://portal.adtran.com/web/page/portal/Adtran/group/330

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Grant money used for GPON is never a good idea :( And the reason why they are using fiber is obviously the large average distance between potential subscribers in rural New York. Note how they are talking about broadband in the article, the poor people don't have any broadband yet. So they didn't even had ADSL yet and therefore it's no surprise that they are directly jumping to fiber.

It would be interesting to know if they are going for 100% coverage? Or are they only building fiber to the lucrative communities?

And the 100Mbit/$60 plan is too expensive if there is no cheaper option.

"Grant money used for GPON is never a good idea"

Uh, false. It's the only worthwhile idea. Long term OpEx for copper is meaningfully higher than FTTH.

I would argue that 100% coverage isn't nearly as important as 90% coverage. People will coalesce around areas that have FTTH, and wiring that last 10% would probably cost almost as much as the first 90%.

FTTH is great but GPON is bad. The only way to go is "Active Ethernet"/AON. Dedicated fibers instead of sharing them with GPON. That was the intention of my post. With AON you have dumb pipes and multiple carriers can offer their services to the connected customers. With GPON the carrier who owns the headend owns all customers. This means there is no open market and the publicly financed infrastructure will be exploited by the single incumbent carrier.

France has GPON with the ability to pick your provider.

The problem is with AON is that each provider is installing their own more expensive head-end equipment.

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