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Comment by gnopgnip | Hacker News Reader

For the urban, and dense suburban areas fiber is a great option and has much higher potential. But there will always be a large portion of the US that is not profitable to run fiber, and already has phone service. We already have multitenant access in the US for all phone service. Just extending the current regulation to cover DSL is all that is needed to allow for competition and improved internet speed. You can get up to 76mbps with VDSL2 over copper wire, just modern modems and provider side equipment. And there is newer technology that provides even better speeds over the same copper wire.

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In the less dense areas the most economical solution for great connectivity is definitely mesh networks. They are even being deployed in very rural areas at a very low cost! http://owni.fr/files/2011/09/Building_a_Rural_Wireless_Mesh_...

Obviously there are better (commercial, prepackaged) mesh network solutions

Mesh networking hasn't really worked out. WISPs, i.e. Wireless Internet Service Providers, do a great job at serving rural (and other) areas.

Hmmm I think it's a bit of a stretch to say mesh networking hasn't really worked out. It just hasn't spread far enough yet.

Have you heard of CJDNS[1]? or BATMAN[2]?

Hyperboria[3] is multiple sizeable deployments of CJDNS. Maybe you heard of Freifunk[4] in Germany, with over 40k access points so far.

[1] https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.A.T.M.A.N.

[3] http://hyperboria.net/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freifunk

Yes, I've heard of them and others, but I think dboreham already put the matter conclusively at rest:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16138402

For buildings (offices, condos, apartments), air fiber solutions are way better and often faster than fiber pulls. 60 GHz microwave, building-to-building if needed, all are in the big cities... why waste time fighting rights to run fiber in dense urban cores?

Define way better. Wireless solutions have many benefits, but they are in no way better in all aspects than fiber.

Fiber has its place, as has wireless.

There's no way there's going to be subloop unbundling after the Supreme Court killer local loop unbundling.

It could happen just for DSL. The big ISP don't really want to service rural areas anyways.

Could happen how? The big ISPs don't want to do it voluntarily and the Supreme Court says they don't have to. Just because the ISPs don't want to serve rural areas doesn't mean they want anybody else to either.

As an illustration of a related inclination, the FCC, pushed by the big telcos—who also tend to be big ISPs—under Ajit Pai killed the use of resellers (non-facilities-based providers) in the Lifeline program, despite the fact that 70% of Lifeline customers used them, often because the facilities-based providers aren't offering them service directly. This got overlooked by a lot of people, because what attention was on the FCC was all about net neutrality.

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