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Comment by subway | Hacker News Reader

That's my (rather depressing) understanding.

I still dream of a non-profit or municipal cable plant, serviced by multiple ISPs. The last mile is a natural monopoly, and we need to stop pretending otherwise.

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Wireless last mile might be an option if the FCC actually opens up the 3.5ghz "innovation band" : http://www.fcc.gov/blog/35-ghz-new-ideas-innovation-band

That proposal seems to be for a 150MHz block. If you try to offer broadband speeds to multiple customers simultaneously with that little spectrum you'll end up needing to use cell sizes so small that it would essentially become a fiber to the curb deployment, at which point you might as well finish off with a handful of ethernet segments instead of several radio links that won't work well.

LTE seems to work well enough with less bandwidth (~60MHz). However I'm not sure what kind of range you can get with 3.5ghz. Surely at least a few city blocks?

LTE works well by the standards of its predecessors, when constrained by draconian data caps and overage charges. It is completely unsuitable as a replacement for wired connections like VDSL and DOCSIS.

I agree that it's extremely depressing. I think we actually need to go farther than unbundling on the last mile, though. Ideally, where possible, we ought to go farther than just re-using existing copper links and instead set things up so that we can more easily and cheaply deliver FTTH.

This net neutrality victory is something to celebrate, but we need to keep the bigger goals in mind for this to not be suboptimal longer term.

I'm hoping that political organizations promoting net neutrality, now expand their attention to this issue or some other way to spur real competition in the last mile.

This. This is the most cogent description of what we need. A common resource that is provided to multiple Telco's but owned by the local community.

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