Comment by eeeeeeeeeeeee | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eeeeeeeeeeeee | Hacker News Reader

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I have WebPass (webpass.net) in Denver, which is a company that Google acquired. It's mainly for residential multi-unit apartment buildings, though. I've had it for several years and it works extremely well. It uses point-to-point radios from their main node in the city to the top of your building, then you get an ethernet hookup in your unit.

I almost always get in the ~700-800Mbps up and down range on ethernet connections, regardless of time of day. Never had any issues during snow, rain, fog, etc.

My guess is that Google realized that fiber-to-the-home is the wrong strategy, and too costly, just as Verizon FIOS halted their rollout years before. And I believe even ATT only does fiber to a neighborhood and then coax to the home, right? It's sad to see, but the cost is astronomical and it's a lot harder to get cities/municipalities to let you dig things up.

Especially for America with it having so much sprawl, a wireless solution will probably work better and the rollout will be quicker.

I know "fiber to the neighborhood and coax to the home" is how both Comcast and WOW operate. Note that coax can provide some fairly decent performance, with DOCSIS 3.1, you can do gigabit down a coax cable, though the networks are still built asymmetrically, so you're only going to see 50 Mbps back up on a connection like that.

Agreed. DOCSIS 3.1 is nice. I think most of the bad news around coax is because a lot of cable operators overload their nodes.

Indeed, and the lack of upload is a design choice, not a physical limitation of the medium, as far as I know. Coax is fairly durable, is less challenging to install and much easier to repair, and as long as they can push the speed over it, I really see no reason to run fiber into the home.

> And I believe even ATT only does fiber to a neighborhood and then coax to the home, right?

No, I have a fiber going right to my dmark. I watched them string it and terminate myself.

In the past, the answer was sometimes. About 6 years ago I lived in a Dallas suburb where I had ATT fiber directly to my house. A friend a few miles away, in Dallas, had copper. We had the same services, same prices, same hardware, etc.

That was their DSL service though right? like 100MB? Not gigabit? I'm talking about the gigabit service specifically. I don't think they run those with copper, because the spec says you can't go more than 100m on copper and get gig speeds.

Hmm, maybe I guess. It was all under the U-Verse brand at the time. I remember they offered something like a 150Mb download, but it was around $300/month.

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