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Comment by cardiffspaceman | Hacker News Reader

AT&T runs radio ads mocking cable internet and specifically its "slow" upload compared to fiber.

In western Canada, the majority of the run is fibre with the last mile using coax. This seems like a good compromise for delivering gigabit internet. It works well for me.

Australia too. About 30% of the National Broadband Network is Hybrid Fibre/Coax (HFC). 100mbps symmetric is available (for business accounts) and many areas can get 250mbps down / 50mbps up. Some limited areas have even been enabled for (Best Effort) gigabit down.

Just to add to the story, there are areas in Australia that also can not even get DSL.

Daintree in FNQ for example, quite a lot of inner australia. Don't get me wrong... I do understand the complexities of delivery, but it isn't perfect either.

No, the NBN is a cluster____. In the cities majority of people are in a decent position (heaven help you if your in a blackspot). For most of the rural areas fixed wireless was to be the answer. However Fixed wireless was under-cooked (technology works, but density makes congestion bad, and high bandwidth plans unavailable). Many cells need to be broken into smaller cells, but that would make the economics even worse.

It works okay, but the integration between the fibre and the last mile has cost an absolute fortune - due to custom hardware & software solution with a relatively short production run (which has also meant that new connections had to be paused as they had run out of NTD hardware and the production line to make more had been closed).

HFC was a massive bodge but it does work... at least for the moment.

My interpretation of the various data points was that it likely did result is a faster roll-out, at pretty much similar costs as FTTP w/ higher maintenance and sooner need to replace.

In other words it did what governments have become expert at, mortgaging the future for the present.

Which is really strange seeing as AT&T considers their 768 kbps DSL to be perfectly sufficient for several markets.

Oh yes. AT&T asked that their DSL plans were not counted towards their "average bandwidth" because they were "obsolete and no longer being marketed".

To be clear - they were still _available_, and in many cases, your only option, but they were an anchor pulling down the average, so AT&T "just didn't want them to count".

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