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Comment by ttul | Hacker News Reader

This is precisely the kind of long term investment that cities should make.

That's twenty years. There is a decent chance that mainstream high speed Internet will be wireless in 20 years.

Wireless has been perpetually behind star topology wired networks despite the fact that it tends to be much easier to upgrade a few antenna's and radios around a city then make people buy new modems every couple years. Worse, wireless is really spotty, I can barely get a data connection where I work and at my house with my carrier, much less a few Mbit/sec. Like WiFi, the advertised peek rates tend to be far in excess of what your likely to get most of the time.

Optical communication is the same way, there is massive bandwidth that isn't being used, so while it might roll out at 1Gbit, it wouldn't' surprise me that in 20 years a x8 stranded fiber network would be well into the Tbit/sec rate.

I think you are significantly underestimating just how long a timespan we're talking about here. Twenty years is a very long time. Twenty years back predates 802.11b. In 1998, our houses and apartments were all wired up with cat5. In San Francisco, at the time, we were thrilled to have Ricochet modems that asymptotically approached ISDN BRI speeds (for that matter, we were generally pretty thrilled to get ISDN BRI speeds to our apartments to begin with).

You don't have to expect breakthroughs to think digging new trenches might be a mistake; all you have to believe is that wireless network performance will continue roughly along the trends it's already been following.

But wired speeds are getting faster too, you need only compare your ISDN modem, with what is possible with DOCSIS 3.1. I used CDPD (early cell phone data service) in the late '90's and that was 19.2 kbit/s which was actually at least in the same ballpark as the POTs modems. So its not like wireless is getting massivly faster and copper has hit a wall. It seems that faster DSP's also help wired communications mechanisms..

There is a clear and obvious point of diminishing returns, which you can see from the fact that to a pretty good first approximation nobody uses wired connections to connect their computers to the Internet; everyone uses 802.11. Yes: wired connections will be faster. But past a threshold, it doesn't matter, and the ease and lower cost of deployment will win out.

There is also a decent chance that it won't be. We (in Boulder) have this same "should we continue the status quo in the present because better technology may be widely deployed in the future?" debate with public transportation vs. self-driving cars / hyperloop / whatever and municipal power infrastructure vs. solar + storage. It's always a tricky question (and I don't come down on the same side in each of those debates).

If the network has been paid back then it's a non issue. Wireless broadband has a host of issues and fiber makes it's adoption less pressing. Sure, if it rolls out in 15 years then the city might be out some capital, but it also gets 15 years use from that fiber network. So, unless it's coming in the next 5-10 years it's probably not worth considering.

It's coming in the next 5 years. AT&T and Verizon are already buying up the necessary spectrum and running trials with working hardware. There will be no point trenching fiber through everyone's yards when you can build a 5G cell in each subdivision for far less money.

I'll believe it when I see it. I don't mean that sarcastically, I mean it literally: when a few competitors appear to own sufficient spectrum, and trials with working hardware have been completed, I will believe it. Until then, I'm happy to pay some sales tax to improve existing well-understood but (in my opinion) under-deployed technology.

That would be awesome, and would have been awesome 10 years ago, but FCC have been successfully fighting against this for a long time so we can't make assumptions. Regardless, fiber will always have more bandwidth than radio, and we'll always need more bandwidth.

Agreed. Invest heavily in WISP technology if possible. Running fiber through bedrock sounds ridiculous.

That wireless still has to connect to a wire at some point.

A huge fraction of the cost of FTTH networks is last mile fiber delivery.

I agree with you, but governments will ask: is it better to back an expensive technology, or a cheaper one like wireless? Is it the government's responsibility to provide the state-of-the-art. or the minimum viable?

I'd prefer it if us Americans would believe in the former, but unfortunately I think our culture expects the government to do the latter (or nothing at all).

I enjoy the state of the art sewer system in my city. It keeps the brown stuff contained and properly disposed of. And it cost billions, with a 100 year replacement cycle that is constantly in progress.

I’m really glad that my sewer system isn’t expected to handle 1000 times the traffic it did 20 years ago.

It's entirely possible that within a year or two, it won't be state of the art at all, if the hype around 5g wireless speeds and bandwidth are to be believed.

Spending a significant amount of money on something that requires a significant install and maintenance (trenching bedrock, cut lines) when there are potential solutions just around the corner seems to me like bad policy.

I'm sure that there are other, more effective uses the government could put that money towards. Maybe the most efficient and beneficial thing for Boulder would be to not take on more debt, I don't know. Just don't be too quick to assume that all expenses and public works projects are net positives.

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