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Comment by 0xy | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to not see fibre internet as a waste of money right now given 4G/5G costs coming down dramatically.

For me personally, 4G is extremely fast and cheap while being, importantly, low-latency.

Even gaming and other latency sensitive applications are possible on 4G/5G. Why not just roll out 5G networks?

Eventually, 5G will outperform fibre on a cost and speed basis (for a long time my FTTH home internet was slower than my 4G connection by a large margin). Of course, I mean practical terms rather than theoretical. Practically, fibre speeds are usually limited by 1Gbps-maximum middleboxes in community fibre cabinets that are not cheap to upgrade.

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I disagree. 4G is severly limited in capacity so speed will vary everywhere, and same will apply to 5G too. Fiber has incredible capacity and can be upgraded by changing OLT and ONT equipment on both sides. It can also run multiple protocols.

2 Gbps XGPON2 is starting to roll out in my country and it's a rather simple upgrade (but costly). If your ISP isn't offering gigabit on fiber, it's purely motivated by greed and lack of competition.

Also I'm not aware of any "community fiber cabinets" limited to 1 Gbps. Are you talking about GPON or Ethernet networks? Ethernet is not FTTH but FTTN, like DOCSIS or VDSL can be.

I have GPON FTTH, as in I can see the fiber strand coming into my apartment. If I call providers and offer to buy beyond 1Gbps for ANY PRICE, even on enterprise plans, they can't do it.

The network is not technically capable of it.

It doesn't necessarily mean the network is not technically capable, they probably just don't have a plan with faster speeds.

GPON is 2.4/1.2 Gbps and it's shared with multiple users so it's incredibly unlikely that any part if the core infrastructure is limited to Gigabit. Only the CPE is.

You can deploy 2 Gbps service on GPON though the quality will be low-ish, or you can run multiple versions of xPON standards on a single fiber network and offer > 1 Gbps to users who you switch to XGPON2. Others stay with existing CPE and plans and GPON as if nothing changed.

4G is fast and cheap when people's bulk data is being offloaded onto wired networks due to data caps. If you put literally all consumer usage on 4G/5G you're going to have to raise the density dramatically, and then you're pulling fiber to every neighborhood anyway, might as well pull them straight into the homes when you're at it and then you're future-proof to 10 Gbit+

For cellular networks the general tradeoff is speed vs range - the higher speed protocols have much shorter range, so you need a more dense network of cell towers. Noone is going to splatter the whole countryside with 4G LTE high-speed coverage, this is going to cover the urban areas only. It's simply not practical to do it for low density areas, you'd have to put up a whole cell tower to cover just a couple people and they aren't going to pay for that; you'd use frequencies and protocols that get longer range but don't get as much speed.

It's worth noting that 5G explicitly combines very different techniques with very different properties (e.g. high-bandwidth short range systems and low power slow networks for things like smart meters), and the 5G systems that are competitive with fibre are essentially designed for dense metropolitan areas, USA won't cover all the suburbs with high-speed 5G.

> Noone is going to splatter the whole countryside with 4G LTE high-speed coverage

You are welcome to come check out our excellent unlimited and uncapped 4G coverage in rural Finland.

Proper network coverage isn’t an issues in countries with functioning telecom regulation and coverage minimums in frequency licenses.

Unlimited & uncapped, yes.

Excellent, doesn't match my experience. I'm not sure if I've been too rural or not rural enough.

I live in rural Utah. Population of our entire county (45 minute radius), is 50k.

For $60/month I get 1 GB down, and about 100MB UP. I have google fi, and yesterday I could barely get reddit gifs to load (it was slow for some reason)... usually it's better, but my FIBER IS WAY BETTER.

I've had 5G home boradband for roughly the last 6 months. Generally getting speeds of 300+ Mbps which is better than the 20 Mbps I can get at my property via copper cables (can't get fibre installed despite being in a large city).

However, whilst the speed is great, the reliability is not. Its currently been disconnected for the last 48 hours with no timeframe given for repairs to the mast. So I'm having to tether of 4G on my phone (on another network).

tl;dr

5G speeds ++ 5G uptime --

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