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AT&T Building Massive Fiber Network That Barely Exists (techdirt.com)

Posted by Soulskill on from the on-paper-it's-huge dept.

An anonymous reader writes: An article at TechDirt points out that AT&T's big fiber deployment project isn't yet adding up to much. They posted a press release last week saying how they've launched fiber internet in Los Angeles and West Palm Beach, and how they also plan to bring it to 38 other metro areas. But TechDirt notes a few parts they left out: "Nowhere does the company state when these connections will be delivered. Similarly nowhere does the company make clear that it's targeting mostly high-end housing developments where fiber is already in the ground, making costs negligible (the only way you could technically accomplish a deployment of this kind and magically have your CAPEX consistently drop). And while AT&T claims these improvements will reach 14 million residential and commercial locations, AT&T gives no timeline for this accomplishment. That means it could cherry pick a few hundred thousand University condos and housing developments per year and be wrapping up this not-so-epic fiber deployment by 2040 or so. "

53 of 91 comments (clear)

  1. Headline by rossdee · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "Building Massive Fiber Network That Barely Exists "

    Thats why thyre building it, becausr it doesn't exist (yet)

    Or did I miss something?

    1. Re:Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      This is all part of the 'new journalism' of 'weaving a story from the facts', aka learning exactly how to compromise one's integrity dollar-for-dollar and/or word-for-word.

    2. Re:Headline by jandrese · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The story is basically about how they're talking up their massive Fiber network, but have actually been cutting back on expansion for several years. It's like when politicians name bills for the opposite thing they're doing. Like the Clean Air Act that allowed more industrial pollution into the air.

      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    3. Re:Headline by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The telcos have have over $2 billion from our tax money to build these new networks. They're not doing it, or are doing it so slow, they'll take centuries to complete.

      It's time they returned our money. Anyone else would be persecuted for not delivering after being paid. Perhaps it's time for CEOs and the boards to do some hard-time.

    4. Re:Headline by oh_my_080980980 · · Score: 2

      Yeah the part where the article mentions that AT&T *ISN'T* building a network but says it is. Reading is fundamental moron.

    5. Re:Headline by boristdog · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Kind of like the $9 billion they took in the 00's to provide rural broadband to the country.

      They just pocketed it and did basically nothing.

    6. Re:Headline by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The press and public aren't the only ones being conned. AT&T has consistently used its phantom fiber deployment as a carrot on a stick with regulators, at one point threatening to stop making these barely-there investments unless regulators walked back net neutrality. AT&T backed off the claim when the FCC asked for hard data, but this kind of telecom theater works exceptionally well in state legislatures. Last week AT&T claimed net neutrality prevented them from innovating, and this week they're portraying themselves as the innovator of the century (even though the only actual innovation here is in misleading PR).

      See, they're not building very much, but they're using it to claim how they'd be forced to stop spending money on improving their infrastructure if those pesky regulators made them follow any rules.

      It's more like they're picking the low hanging fruit along the side of a road, but are claiming to be building orchards and highways.

      They're dinosaurs sitting on a business model by which they keep charging more money for the same thing, while ultimately NOT investing in new infrastructure and instead acting like they deserve money for doing nothing.

      What you're missing is they're not really building it. They're adding a small amount of capacity in places where it is super easy and to do it because someone already built the infrastructure, and then pretending they're some kind of cutting edge innovators of the network of the future.

      So, just how much of the money they've collected and said it's for improving infrastructure has actually been used to that end, and how much has just been skimmed off as profits to ensure the stock stays high and executive bonuses keep going up?

      When they don't invest in real infrastructure and adding new capacity, it's just a shell game to pretend they're not just leaving the existing stuff to rot.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    7. Re:Headline by plover · · Score: 2

      I think you've missed the even-more-sinister plot afoot. By announcing their intent to build a network, they're sowing confusion among under-served communities that have been considering building their own networks. The cities that have already built their own municipal networks have been extremely happy with them; they cost far less than a private network, and service is much more responsive than with the big network providers. The experiences are so good that more and more cities are considering them. Municipal networks are such a threat to the network providers that the telco lobbyists have gotten them outlawed in several states. By promising that a new network is underway, they are shutting down the discussions in the city councils in these cities so they won't even consider building their own.

      Without a description of coverage and no completion date, they basically bought themselves five years of non-competition with little more than a press release. How's that for a return on investment!

      --
      John
  2. ive got some bad news for you. by nimbius · · Score: 1

    it could cherry pick a few hundred thousand University condos and housing developments per year and be wrapping up this not-so-epic fiber deployment by 2040 or so.

    If this is the first time you've stopped to consider ma bell as a conglomerate that does not operate in the greater common good, then i suppose 2016 is going to be a rough year. its not just AT&T thats at fault, but the schizophrenic common carrier response by internet providers in general. Fibre is all well and good, but the last mile into everyones home is still going to have to be a cable connection for higher-than-dsl speed, and cable companies aren't just going to give it to you. The other alternative, to spread out into existing markets, means asking homeowners and landlords to undertake expensive retrofits for cat6 and fibre drops.

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
    1. Re:ive got some bad news for you. by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      You can get 10Gbps over twisted pair.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    2. Re:ive got some bad news for you. by quintus_horatius · · Score: 1

      Fibre is all well and good, but the last mile into everyones home is still going to have to be a cable connection for higher-than-dsl speed

      My Verizon FIOS service begs to differ. So do the lucky folks with Google Fiber. In fact, when I used to have DSL my 10+ meg connection was on par with the local cable provider's speeds -- without the terrible latency at peak times that my cable-subscribed neighbors experienced.

      Your statements might be colored by a poor experience with DSL. Some installations are better than others -- it seems to be a neighborhood-by-neighborhood issue. It's obvious you've never had fiber of any type, and you don't even mention satellite or metropolitan WIFI. Cable is not the end-all, be-all internet provider.

    3. Re:ive got some bad news for you. by tippen · · Score: 1

      l. Fibre is all well and good, but the last mile into everyones home is still going to have to be a cable connection for higher-than-dsl speed, and cable companies aren't just going to give it to you. The other alternative, to spread out into existing markets, means asking homeowners and landlords to undertake expensive retrofits for cat6 and fibre drops.

      That may be true on average, but I've got fiber to my house and I get 940 Mbps+ up and down from AT&T GigaPower for the last year.

  3. I was skeptical, too. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've seen quite a bit of Fiber To The Press Release, but here in the RTP area of North Carolina, they're digging like crazy. Our decidedly-not-upscale neighborhood has already received the doorknob hang-tabs about excavation, and the Miss Utility painters have been around.

    Probably helps that Google Fiber has named us as part of their next round of deployments, although they seem to have put things on hold until the new year.

    I'm unimpressed with AT&T's advertising, monitoring and capping policies, but they're already having a positive effect -- last time I threatened to drop TWC, they bumped me to 50/5, which is now 200/20, all at less than $40/month. Competition rocks.

    1. Re:I was skeptical, too. by Rob+Lister · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Verizon laid fiber in my neighborhood about two years ago. I was impressed with the technology to mole cable between two holes fifty feet apart. The cable company suddenly doubled their speed to remain competitive. I didn't switch because in the long run, the cable company is cheaper.

      It is easy to understand why the cost of running that fiber in an existing neighborhood makes the margins pretty slim. They have to promise the world to get their mergers and acquisitions. Seems they only have to deliver Pluto.

    2. Re:I was skeptical, too. by ComputerGeek01 · · Score: 1, Offtopic

      ... they bumped me to 50/5, which is now 200/20, all at less than $40/month. Competition rocks.

      For anyone who wants some perspective on internet pricing in other parts of the US. I'm in Western New York (Buffalo), paying the same company, Time Warner, $65 a month for 25/10 (burst) with the only form of competition being Verizon ADSL which although it is in my area, it is not actually available where I live, nor is it adequate for my needs. My office was paying about $150 a month for 35/10 (burst) and one static IP in a slightly more rural area until we switched to nearly $400 month for 10/10 (dedicated) fiber. All of this is with the same company that the user I am responding to uses. To top things off, our Mayor was publically in favor of the Time Warner Comcast merger, so I don't expect our government to put any effort into actually making anything better.

      Tl;dr: Monopolies suck

    3. Re:I was skeptical, too. by Gr8Apes · · Score: 2

      I've had AT&T U-verse, Verizon FIOS, Comcast and TWC cable.

      Comcast has always sucked, it's great when it works but is so flaky you can't even rely on it for home use, at least where I was. I think a finch landing on the cable would knock it out.

      TWC was better, but when it rained, well, see Comcast's finch report.

      U-verse in their FTTH (fiber all the way to the box on mounted to my house) was initially awesome in the days of DSL, but was so oversubscribed in my area after a few years that you could not get more than 1Mbps up, no matter what plan you wanted to buy. In fact they were happy to "upgrade" me to any plan so they could split my then current 2Mbps up between me and someone else, as they were not about to even give me a new plan with 2Mbps. To top it off, that area was not going to get upgraded in any form, at all, despite obviously being a money maker for them. And I'm 99% sure I only got 2Mbps up during certain hours. The "competition" there was the old Comcast cable network, which I don't believe had any significant investment since the 1990s.

      FIOS is the only one that has truly delivered with 50/50 connections life is good network wise. TV wise, FIOS is better than U-verse or TWC, but still has significant short-comings in the consumer friendliness department. It's obvious it's a marketing platform to sell more services, and little else.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    4. Re:I was skeptical, too. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 1

      If it's not AT&T, AT&T will probably want to find out who has been hanging tags on our doorknobs notifying us about the excavation, and using the AT&T GigaPower logo.

      Even the mid-range neighborhoods around here harbor a lot of tech workers. We're lucky enough to be a big, tempting target.

      Frontier, the ILEC we're saddled with, deployed its own FttPR effort a year or two ago. I think they've hooked up an office complex or two, and one residential development where I don't think anyone's even started building houses. Beyond that, Frontier offers blazing 6/1 DSL (over our old GTE/Verizon physical plant). TWC was offering up to 100Mb, I think, at a hefty price, and was starting to mutter about caps. AT&T served us NOTHING, no physical plant at all, prior to this buildout. So, nobody took Frontier seriously, but apparently everyone takes Google seriously, and the Google Fiber announcement for our area had barely finished repainting before TWC started pushing out MAXX and AT&T rolled the backhoes.

    5. Re:I was skeptical, too. by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 1

      Yep, that was about the boat we were in before Google announced -- we do also have TWC, but that didn't motivate Frontier to offer anything beyond 6/1 DSL (except the FttPR deployment I mention downthread).

      I can only hope that Google finds a way to profit on widespread deployment. Their announcement here has really lit a fire under everyone. As a result, AT&T and TWC are moving, and Frontier is probably shriveling to ash.

    6. Re:I was skeptical, too. by Widowwolf · · Score: 1

      > Probably helps that Google Fiber has named us as part of their next round of deployments...

      1) Are you sure it's ATT doing the excavation?

      2) This is the only reason ATT would *actually* be laying fiber to such a down-scale place as yours. ATT makes money hand-over-fist on their Capex expenditures from way back in the 1980's and 1990's. Why would they want to increase those Capex costs just to give you faster service? (Hint: They don't.)

      Right now it's way cheaper in long term to install fiber for Repair/Upgrades then Capex

      --
      ~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
  4. FttPR by matthaak · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yes, this technology is called Fiber-to-the-Press-Release

  5. My street is getting it right now . . . by Idou · · Score: 1

    They just suddenly started drilling under people's driveways (appeared to accidentally cut through an electrical line across my street). I think after a week of construction they actually notified people by putting a flyer on their front door knobs. . .

    Another characteristic of my neighborhood is that it seems to be a logical location to be the next batch of Google fiberhood sign-up areas. . .

    Looks like ATT is moving at "chicken with head cut-off" speed these days. . . (at least from my perspective)

    --
    Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
  6. What is the solution? by AmazinglySmooth · · Score: 2

    So, what should we do about it?

    1. Re:What is the solution? by Junta · · Score: 1

      It's not about what should be done, it's about calling companies out on drumming up interest out of words that do not necessarily promise anything.

      This is actually refreshing to see someone call out a company for making nice sounding announcements devoid of any meaningful way to evaluate their actual performance against their press release promises. It's something almost every company does and has done for a long time. Particularly as lazy journalism has allowed corporate press releases to be little more than copy and pasted and run as a 'story' without any sort of analysis. Journalism at that point is little more than just another advertising venue. Except in stories like this where someone bothers to critically consider what is being said and evaluate what has been done.

      Of course, there are certain lovable corporations that seem to always get away with this (google and facebook notably) with no one interested in critical assessment and there are certain punching bag corporations (petroleum, banking) that at least entice a few folks to be critical because people will eat it right up. Being hyper critical of those sorts of companies is good (and it's fair to say they've done plenty to deserve it), but I want to see more critical takes on all press releases. If it's worth copy and pasting a company press release for 'journalism', it's worth some effort to explore it in context (or at least clearly mark it as 'pass through press release fluff' somehow).

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
  7. Screw AT&T by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    They yanked my chain for 7 years teasing us with UVerse. It finally came and was teh same shitty 3.0/.384 speeds that their DSL was. Charter finally ran cables down my street and I got hooked up this last weekend. Went from 3 down to 66 down. And dropped $5/month (after the initial signup deal expires!) from my bill.

    AT&T is a shit company that can't die fast enough.

    1. Re:Screw AT&T by internerdj · · Score: 1

      They keep trying to get me to upgrade and they don't even have the equipment installed to serve my street. We tried a couple of years ago and it took 3 techs coming out to our house to figure out that that was the problem.

  8. Trying to Appear to Keep Up with Google Fiber by jarich · · Score: 1

    That's all... nothing else to see here...

    --
    Agile Artisans
  9. Re:AT&T is for cows. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    but what does the fox say? hmmmmm

  10. Competition by internerdj · · Score: 1

    I live near one of the cities in question. Last year, our local utilities company started a search for a fiber internet provider for the municipality. They decided they didn't want to be the provider but we needed to have one. Right now the major internet suppliers are AT&T and Comcast. The timing of this announcement makes me think they realized they were going to be driven out of town by another company pretty soon. I wonder how many other cities on the list are doing the same.

    1. Re:Competition by internerdj · · Score: 1

      But that does mean, at least for my town, they have to roll out a solution prior to our utilities company finishing its process.

  11. They did for me. by AndyKron · · Score: 1

    A couple of weeks ago a guy from AT&T knocked on my door and said they just installed fiber in my backyard. So WTF?

    1. Re:They did for me. by Guyle · · Score: 4, Informative

      A guy from AT&T knocked on my door and said the same thing. "Really? Sweet! I've been waiting for ages." I took him into my backyard and said "Show me where." I don't have an alley and everything is aerial, so for them to bury fiber in the backyard would be a pain in the ass and waaaaay more expensive than just hanging it on the poles. He looked around on the ground for peds anyway, didn't see any, then stared up at the poles with a confused look on his face. "See that? *points* That's a 50 pair copper cable running down those poles serving my street and the street over there *waves*. That terminal there *points* feeds the copper drops going to those four *points* houses. The cable above that *points* is Charter's cable, and then I really hope you know that those cables up top *waves* are power lines. So tell me.. where's your fiber?"

      He stood silent for a few seconds and said "I apologize for disturbing you sir" and walked off.

      From my days as a premise tech for Uverse I'm 99% certain he was a contractor paid to sell door to door. They like to bend the "truth" that fiber does, indeed, serve a DSLAM somewhere in your neighborhood so therefore you have fiber service. However, I'm not paying AT&T's prices for bonded pair VDSL on old aerial cable to get 45 megs with bandwidth caps when I can get 60 megs from Charter with no bandwidth caps for less. If and/or when AT&T actually does run fiber down my poles, I'm pretty sure I'll notice, and I'll decide if the cost is worth the megabits and limitations then.

    2. Re:They did for me. by SScorpio · · Score: 1

      They tried that with me about two years ago.

      My response? Sweet, what kind of speeds are you offering now?

      We offer up to 20Mbps dow..

      At that point I just quickly closed the door and walked away.

    3. Re:They did for me. by Vertigo+Acid · · Score: 1

      Centurylink pulls the same crap here.

      --
      Beta is bad enough to make me go edit settings like this sig that haven't been touched since I joined
  12. Building in chicagoland by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    They are Building in chicagoland.

    Seen a lot of trucks and new cables being ran. I hope they move me from copper (under ground) to fiber. In a newer area then some of the non under ground area they are building in. Just down the road.

  13. Promises by ITRambo · · Score: 1

    Promises without a timeline is rhetoric only. These guys act like a married man that keeps promising his wife that he'll fix a squeak in the floor, then steps around it to make sure he doesn't hear it again.

  14. Re:ATT Fiber is Late? you're lucky you're getting by oh_my_080980980 · · Score: 1

    You do realize AT&T is in name only. The company was SBC. SBC changed its name to AT&T. Look it up sometime.

    Verizon stopped rolling out FIOS because they are a cell carrier. They want you to use cell for internet. They want to build more cell towers. It's a business decision.

    You can fuck off troll.

  15. AT&T sent me a letter by jetkust · · Score: 1

    AT&T send me a letter this week asking me to join their high speed gigabit network. No. I don't care for gigabit speeds when you can't even keep the service running for longer than a week. And when it does break your entire debugging process is to turn the modem on and off and then send a tech (all within an hour long phone call somehow). Then the techs whole debugging process is more or less the same and then after than pretending to do stuff until the next call (this process costs you an entire day). Wired service will always be crappy because when it breaks (and it will) they have no real incentive to fix it because you're just one guy. I moved everything to mobile (tv and internet) and I'm not going back.

  16. Re:Perspective by KGIII · · Score: 1

    ( I'm pretty sure you don't have any spare single mode fiber laying about the house, nor the hardware to interface with the carrier hardware )

    You must be new here. You'd be surprised what some of us have in our basements. I'd be shocked if nobody here had the appropriate equipment. I know I have a good length of fiber left over that somehow made it all the way to Maine when I moved. I doubt it's any good, it's probably been bent too much to be of any value.

    However, I've got like racks in my basement. I have a whole server "closet" that's actually pretty huge. I've even got an inbound call router should I ever want to set up my own dial-up ISP. No, I'd be shocked if *nobody* here had that type of gear in their basement. This is /., you know. We've either got a closet full of kit or a closet full of gimp outfits. Hell, some of us have both.

    --
    "So long and thanks for all the fish."
  17. you don't know how hard this is by swschrad · · Score: 2

    why, it will take until the FCC crawls their back, and about 6-8 months longer, to meet their goals. seriously. it's just so hard when it's only for money, not for a reason to still live.

    --
    if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
  18. as long as you are in the shadow of the DSLAM by swschrad · · Score: 1

    things are different when the wiring in the ground is cat-3 at best, and might be lead/paper/steel in the heart of downtown.

    --
    if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
    1. Re:as long as you are in the shadow of the DSLAM by Gr8Apes · · Score: 1

      If you have POTS, we're not talking about modern networking.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
  19. Yeah... meanwhile in Tennessee by Aryden · · Score: 1

    They "ran" fiber into my "neighborhood". So what really happened was, they put in a hub near Lee university. Then came around "selling" the residents of the area on how great the service is. /sarc/ For only $70 a month + installation fees, (re: running the actual fiber from the hub to my house via telephone poles" you get a whopping 18MB down with an amazing 4MB up connection! What a deal! /sarc/. The kid who came by trying to sell me the service just couldn't understand the concept that my cable connection was faster. I had to give him an analogy. I drive a dodge, you drive a ferrari. You COULD go 150mph down the highway, but, the state decided to put in new speed limit signs: Ferraris: 18mph, all other cars 55mph.

  20. Re:ATT Fiber is Late? you're lucky you're getting by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

    You do realize AT&T is in name only. The company was SBC. SBC changed its name to AT&T. Look it up sometime.

    Well, no. The bell co was split up into the multitude of bells. Now they are reforming into the bell co again. What you know as AT&T today and what you formerly knew as SBC also includes other bells, like Pacific Bell. And SBC and Pacific Bell were already themselves conglomerates of smaller bells. AT&T is as good a name as anything; arguably, they should just call themselves the Bell Company again, because that's what they are again. They cover most of the households in the USA.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  21. Re:ATT Fiber is Late? you're lucky you're getting by Aryden · · Score: 1

    Actually, during the MA BELL breakup, different areas were sold off or became different companies. AT&T was one, Verizon another. Verizon does not own all the phone lines.

  22. Re:ATT Fiber is Late? you're lucky you're getting by PPH · · Score: 1

    Verizon stopped rolling out FIOS because they are a cell carrier.

    Fortunately, they ran it in my neighborhood before they figured that out. And then they sold their POTS/Fiber system to Frontier. I held out for a few years with ClearWire WiMax until Sprint went tits up and pulled the plug. So I switched to FIOS. The installation went well, particularly since I pulled a Cat 5 cable to the location of the network interface. The technician was quite happy about not having to crawl through another attic dragging a cable.

    One little complaint: The NID has battery backup. But evidently the fiber network does not. Because I lost my broadband during a 20 hour power outage. Damnit, even our traffic lights have battery backup!

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  23. Exactly--Fraud on the taxpayers by Etherwalk · · Score: 2

    Kind of like the $9 billion they took in the 00's to provide rural broadband to the country.

    They just pocketed it and did basically nothing.

    Almost certainly *exactly* like that. They're probably doing it to pick up money they've gotten from the public through Congress, most likely in the term of tax breaks. It turns out that when you call something a "tax cut," the public usually doesn't notice when Congress gives a company or industry a couple of billion dollars from the public's taxes.

  24. For real in Durham, NC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Shortly after Google announced the decision to install their fiber in Raleigh-Durham area, AT&T planted the big orange conduit, then the black fiber bundles all over our neighborhoods this past summer (mostly standalone houses, about "middle income"). I even had to roll an empty cable spool out of my yard down the street to where some of their equipment was parked for a while.

    U-Verse became available shortly thereafter - had an AT&T guy come to our door to offer it. Some neighbors have gotten it, and are commenting about it on a local listserv type web site, especially the ones annoyed by sloppy installations that ruined landscaping and even sprinkler systems, plus trash left by the installers. The city of Durham has contracted with a guy to chase down complaints by residents with AT&T. We still see some of the individual cables from junction boxes to houses lying alongside some streets, and a few even crossing the street. Not surprisingly, some of the listserv discussion included accounts by some of those cross-street cables being damaged by traffic, and thus losing phone/TV/Internet - duhhh.

    Meanwhile my TimeWarner cable Internet speeds have gone from 30/10 Mbps this past May, when first installed, to over 200/30 Mbps - love that competition.

    FWIW

  25. Re:Just let Business Get Down To Business by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 1

    I think you stepped in some Poe. You might want to check your shoes.

  26. Re:ATT Fiber is Late? you're lucky you're getting by Widowwolf · · Score: 1

    They are not completely reformed back together. From what was originally AT&T has split into 3 nowadays AT&T, Qwest and Verizon http://subjunctive.net/klog/20...

    --
    ~~"Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong." ~~Dennis Miller
  27. Re:ATT Fiber is Late? you're lucky you're getting by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

    They are not completely reformed back together. From what was originally AT&T has split into 3 nowadays AT&T, Qwest and Verizon http://subjunctive.net/klog/20...

    Right, but AT&T has more land lines than either of those other guys. That's why cable and fiber have them puckered more than anyone else. DSL is relevant to them. Verizon has more retail wireless customers than AT&T, so if the land line goes away, Verizon is more powerful than AT&T...

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  28. Fibernets Of Unusual Size? by rwyoder · · Score: 1

    I don't think they exist.

  29. Wireless networks are a better investment by Ranbot · · Score: 1

    Telecoms are investing in wireless networks over fiber because when the next generation of wireless mobile internet (5G) comes, it will move data faster at speeds competitive with land-based cable/DSL/Fiber, so selling those land-based internet services will get harder. Consider that 4G LTE can already move data fast enough to accommodate basic internet use (e.g. web browsing, email, basic streaming) and 5G will be faster without laying and maintaining expensive cables all over the planet. For rural areas in particular it will be much more cost-effective to reach homes with a 5G tower on a hilltop than run fiber along miles of rural roads. There were Slashdot stories from earlier this year that Verizon is already testing a 5G network and it's safe to assume AT&T is working theirs too. Mobile ISPs won't satisfy everyone though and some users will be willing to pay a premium for more bandwidth, which is why fiber is still being installed in wealthier, more densely populated neighborhoods.

  30. Re:Just let Business Get Down To Business by mschwanke97402 · · Score: 1

    Poe is exactly what I was going for! Thanks for noticing!!