AT&T kills DSL, leaves tens of millions of homes without fiber Internet
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
At first they did build out some fiber, but never lit it. One terminates 200 yards from my house, since a decade ago, but they have been selling 3Mb DSL instead at $50/mo. Until now. Now, nothing.
String them up.
I don’t expect any national government to take this up.
Hence fiber internet should be a public utility, like water, sewer, gas, and electric.
Furthermore: fibers provide overwhelmingly more bandwidth capacity than (almost) anyone needs, and hardly nobody needs two fiber connections. So, different providers can share the same fiber installation, either renting to one another, or renting from local government.
Finally, maintaining fiber is much less costly than, say, sewers, they last much longer, and are way simpler to manage, so local governments can operate them directly, and provide service more cheaply by dispensing with billing activity, folding costs into the tax base, as with sewage service.
Until everyone wants to use the SpaceX Mars Landing Live Immersion app on their Apple Shades that streams the entire 360° 3D 16k Ultra HDR helmet camera with fully directional sound. Or a protracted pandemic forces people to actually iterate on remote work tech, and instead of god-awful laptop webcams, eventually setups with 4k 3D video become the norm, and then you may have two working adults and kids taking remote lessons at the same time... not saying that current-gen fiber will become too slow anytime soon, and I'm sure there's still a lot of headroom left, but such statements have a tendency to age badly.
Not that I'm against treating this as a utility (I think that's absolutely the way to go), but it should be one that has frequent upgrades planned into it (unlike e.g. sewers)
Simultaneously, in the late 1980s, various regional companies tried to set up cable TV and phone networks by laying their own cable, and eventually they consolidated into NTL, which was eventually rebranded. These have their own fibre cable network, but because it was privately funded and set up, there's no obligation for other companies to have access to it.
There's multiple levels of sharing, but just having regulation to force telecoms to lease the most local part (the cable that goes from your house to a shared switch) goes a long way. The US isn't well-regulated on that front.
In France, not only is the local loop (and much of the network) shared, when Orange came to install fiber in our apartment they had to install four fiber ports + wires in the same cable, so we can switch to any the other major 3 operators painlessly (or, we could if any of them had fiber in our building).
The infrastructure-sharing regulations, as well as aggressive anti-trust action, is why France has one of the best internet coverages in the world at one of the lowest prices, 15 years after the public telecom operator was privatized.
If it's just DSL service then to be honest 4G is likely to be vastly better for most people. Some will be left out though, which is a real pain, but many countries are switching off new DSL connections (though probably not as quickly/aggressively in rural areas as AT&T is here) if not migrating en mass to at least VDSL.
DSL requires a tonne of maintence compared to even VDSL/FTTN, as you can replace the main run of copper from the exchange to the local node with fibre and then just need to worry about the last mile connection part. In most network topologies this reduces the amount of copper in the last mile by 70%+, with significant opex savings. 4G/5G can provide better speeds in nearly all cases with none of the cost. Starlink will also be super interesting for this segment too.
How does this work? Is it FTTN from one ISP and then copper from the node to the home via another ISP? Is it one bill?
It really depends. I have Comcast Business and it has been great. I used to have Fusion from Sonic in an apartment in Santa Clara, CA at 9Mb/s. This was acceptable and the service never felt constrained. Unfortunately, I moved to a house in the same city and the bandwidth Sonic quoted was 3Mb/s. They pitched bonded to bring it up to 6Mb/s. At that point I looked into Comcast Business which starts at 35Mb/s and the L1 support aren't idiots.
Sonic has its own problems. I have been a customer of theirs off and on for over twenty years, and their support has gotten worse while their sales tactics started mimicking AT&T and Comcast. Being a scrappy underdog doesn't cut it anymore.
It took three attempts to get a DSL connection at my last apartment because AT&T failed to do work on their end. Granted, Sonic is dependent on AT&T and they are treated as a customer in this regard, but it is a major weakness. A customer should NOT be informing Sonic that a scheduled activation wasn't completed; Sonic should be the party reaching out to a customer.
I have had modem reboots and complete failures with Sonic equipment. Documented these incidents in excruciating detail and Sonic support responds with boiler plate, telling me to do things I have already done. I would love to buy my own equipment, but unlike cable modems, nobody makes DSL modems for the general market anymore.
I never signed up for promotional email, but Sonic started sending me a sales pitch every week for DirectTV. I normally deleted these, but it got to a point that I was getting three a week. When did Sonic decide that automatic opt-in was an acceptable business practice?
However, most Sonic Fusion accounts are resold AT&T circuits, including FTTN. As long as Sonic is at the mercy of AT&T, infrastructure issues can crop up. In the late 1990s, which was pre-Fusion, my Sonic DSL service stopped working. After a week of no Internet, Sonic informed me that AT&T had used my active circuit for another customer. The DSLAM was over subscribed and AT&T took a reseller circuit and used it for a new, non-reseller circuit. Because the DLSAM had no capacity, I was SOL. I switched to Comcast.
I had another issue when I lived in my last apartment a few years ago. When Sonic came out to service the line, they put a quality cable in the building's wire closet. Well, AT&T decided they liked that cable and took it for another customer. The cable had a Sonic label, they knew it wasn't their service. I am convinced AT&T does this on purpose since resold circuits bring in less revenue.
There is nothing Sonic can do for these types of shenanigans. Dane keeps on pimping Sonic's fiber but it has limited availability. I am in my 50s, I will be dead before it comes to Santa Clara, California, the middle of Silicon Valley.
Which they are still offering with speeds that can go higher than 6Mbps up and all have 1TiB monthly caps. Or since they have historical data, maybe the future scavenging is dedicated to maintaining their existing customers, covering the usual old age failures, and nastier ones like DSLAMs getting destroyed by accidents, lightening, and natural disasters.
I'm not sure how exactly how they do their "ASDL/VDSL" which I now use, but their old school ADSL in my home town when I and my family started using it a decade and a half ago was ASDL to the DSLAM, then ATM to a monster Cisco box 70 miles away.
Nearly every VDSL modem/router and DSLAM is also compatible all the way back to ADSL1, at least that I've seen.
More likely is that Starlink and competitors end up being good enough in rural areas to make DSL even less of a viable product than it is now. The government subsidizes these services but how long will that make sense for the government, the telecoms, or the customers?