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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

> Anyway, my hat is off to the people who designed and implemented ADSL.

It's a blessing-and-a-curse: too many incumbent ISPs in highly-developed nations used ADSL's ability to run on anything as an excuse to put-off FTTH deployments (looking at you, BT).

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I think we (in Stamford Lincolnshire, UK) must be pretty unique right now with TWO competing FTTP startups both rolling out on the same streets. One day you will see Lightspeed Broadband pulling their fibre through the BT ducts and putting boxes on the top of telegraph polls. The next day Upp Brordband will be on the same street. So bizarre they they are doing the same town!

Apparently we are due to have BT put in their own fibre in the next few months too. Really don’t understand why they are doubling up the infrastructure.

Hoping for a local price war!

How strange to see my hometown mentioned! Still not too far away and yes hoping for some local competition

Very strange! Mine was not quite as happy a story, but here in Silicon Valley (1mi from Facebook) I got a local ISP announcing fiber, and the very next week AT&T was running their own lines. This was back in 2019, and it felt like "everyone" had fiber before we did. 2 years later I guess it feels like old hat. And the local ISP has not yet run the fiber they promised. But one fast ISP is better than zero!

Good luck with your deployment. I'm still so happy about it.

Your incumbent killed the local ISP's project. Fibre customers generally won't change ISPs in the first 2-3 years of having service, so being undercut by the incumbent makes it worthless to continue with the cost of construction when you'll only get a handful of customers. I know because the incumbent has done exactly the same thing to me. A project that planned on having 140 customers can't be supported by 5.

They're actually still rolling out, just slowly. Of course, this might well have caused the slowdown.

Basically there is an enormous amount of capital (at least £10bn from startup providers) out there going into UK FTTH builds. BT focussed too much of content (BT Sport) instead of FTTH and private equity now thinks there is an opp to steal marketshare from BT/VM.

However BT have now now committed £10-20bn, VM probably a few billion.

It will quickly consolidate like it always does.

Thanks, I figured it was something like that. One of the startups here is a bunch of former BT execs so I was assuming they were hoping to exit by selling either to BT or VM.

Here in high-density London, we're stuck with ~70mbps ADSL and not even cable.

Not representative of all of London, but at least around my parts it is slow ADSL or nothing :(

Are you suggesting 70Mbps is slow ADSL? There are many places where not even a tenth of that speed is possible.

it's the UK average for urban ADSL. and those many places are where the FTTH startups are springing up

I had a chuckle at the 3.5Mbps that the wet string was getting in the article. When I first moved in to this house, I was getting around 3Mbps on ADSL. Thankfully now I'm on 100Mbps fibre (not amazing by global standards, but good by Australian standards).

That wet string would have been an upgrade for me.

Knew you were from Australia as soon as you mentioned your old speed.

100Mbps isn't great for fibre. I'm on 100Mbps just on plain old HFC.

BT have left a large number of people on ADSL. No VDSL upgrade.

Nit: if 70Mbps isn’t a typo, then you’re on VDSL not ADSL.

ADSL tops out at ~24Mbps while VDSL can go much higher, albeit over shorter distances than ADSL

From previous personal experience in building new plants, and expanding existing plants: Cost of deployment and slow roi are the primary drivers of stagnating local networks.

Complicated corporate accounting, carrier incumbency, and weak governments are the core causes. Carriers being publicly traded companies really screws up incentives to fix these problems. It seems to be mostly a binary decision at the top; more profit or better service?

also, the infra (which ADSL runs on) was build in a time when telephone companies used to be either state-owned or a single monopoly with heavy goverment involvement.

Doing the same thing with fiber is necessary, but will not happen without strong govermental involvement.

Indeed. New Zealand has had a pretty successful fiber roll out over the last several years because the government awarded exclusive contracts to fiber providers that then have to provide access to their network to all ISPs.

Works great. Even my village of several hundred people has fiber now.

Telenor

They also did the same, stalling and delaying, insisting on introducing ISDN 64/128kbit instead of going straight to DSL like Holland did.

Meh

In hind sight wouldn’t 5g have been a better investment than fiber to home, I mean companies will have to have 5g to stay competitive in mobile anyway

No, because 5g is a shared medium. It can deliver... 3 gigabit/s? or something like that? Let's say it's 10Gb. That's 10gb shared with everyone in the vicinity, which is not great especially in high density areas like apartment buildings.

Furthermore, you still need to run fiber to the actual base stations anyway.

Yes, but at those wavelengths you can do substantial amounts of MU-MIMO/beamforming.

I think you are answering “is it better bandwidth per household”, while I am talking mb/S per dollar and ROI.

Where I am 5g is same price as fixed broadband but faster for my plan.

Are you paying and using 1g/s have no caps ?

Personally I am yes, but I know that's not the case everywhere. I get that you mean in terms of ROI, but that's ROI for the business, not for you the customer. So I guess what I'm getting at is, why would you suggest the thing that's better for the business but worse for you?

Because it’s not worse for me, it’s the same cost and value. To the other point, companies outside monopolies and prestige add a margin, if they do it cheaper it flows to the consumer, a company isn’t going to have low fiber margin if they can have better 5g margin, but I suppose the proof is in the pudding (and government incentives)

Perhaps in densely-populated areas, but certainly not in sparsely-populated areas.

>>...*my hat is off to the people who designed and implemented ADSL.*

Maybe a few will recall: San Jose California, in the epicenter of Silicon Valley -- but for some reason Comcast (was previously called *COVID*) -- and you couldnt get DSL in San Jose at the time .... literally down the street from Netflix, and freaking home DSL took YEARS for it to reach our houses...

(My point is that it was ironic that in the heart of silicon valley we couldnt even get DSL due to COVID/Comcast

Are you thinking of COVAD? IIRC, they were a competitive local exchange carrier, unrelated to Comcast.

As a CLEC, they could place DSL equipment in the incumbent carriers (mostly Pacific Bell/ATT, but Los Gatos Telephone company was absorbed by GTE/Verizon and I think sold to Frontier) and use the existing wiring to run DSL. In silicon valley, this doesn't offer great coverage; to get reasonable line lengths, you need to be in the telephone company's remote terminals and that's not available to CLECs.

It was available in CenturyLink/Qwest areas. Not sure about now, a lot of the loop products have been grandfathered recently.

https://www.centurylink.com/wholesale/pcat/fcp.html

I was one of two providers in their 13 state region that used it. It was really successful and let us put in ADSL and then Ethernet over Copper in business parks.

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