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Comment by ryder9 | Hacker News Reader

You still need to lay fiber for 5G base stations

And if you're going to bring the fiber most of the way, you might as well terminate it at the premises.

That depends heavily on the location.

In many suburban developments, the power/communication lines are all buried underground. It would probably be much easier to install a couple of microcells around the neighborhood than to dig up everyone's lawn.

I was lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where Verizon initially installed FiOS. It was a massive undertaking. They had to trench every street in my development. I was young at the time, but I remember thinking how massive the effort was considering not every house would even sign up for it.

I’ll confirm, as a crew is dragging/trenching fiber as we speak (I’m looking out the back window watching after ordering them pizza) at a family member’s home in a suburban community, to be terminated on the side of each home (fiber to the premises).

They ran aerial fiber to the neighborhood, and then ran the fiber under each street, with the final run being placed in the backyard easement between house rows (with a Ditch Witch doing the heavy lifting).

Family member is going from AT&T DSL for $40/month with 3Mb down/1Mb up to $50/month for 200Mb down/75Mb up (with a two year price guarantee and no data caps). It’s quite the deal.

That's a little weird. I lived in an area that had fiber installed, it's pretty nonintrusive. The fiber is laid under the side walk and the last bit from the side walk to the house is blasted in. You have a small hole dug by the house and another one by the side walk, no trenches needed.

At no point does a fiber installation require digging up an entire road or even your lawn.

In my old neighborhood, I saw Comcast fishing cables through the street drainage sewers. Not sure if there was a separate conduit that was accessed via those grates, or if it actually just laid along the the bottom of the sewer pipe lines.

This isn't necessarily the case. Bringing that cable an extra ~300m and providing the ONT hardware for each house is quite expensive for the small number of customers that might benefit in a rural area. Terminating at fast wireless and providing radios is much more cost effective from the telco's perspective.

From the telco's perspective, yes. From an end user who is getting fiber from a coop or muni fiber provider, it's about $300-$500, which might be considered reasonable if your ongoing operating costs (and therefore, costs to the end user) are lower.

Disclaimer: I have contributed to a muni fiber project, and am familiar with trenching/arial mounting and premises termination costs.

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