So Google: they were never the harbingers of a fiber future. They basically had no idea what they were doing, screwed every contractor they worked with, and then let the project die when it was realized that Fiber has nothing to do with the future.
AT&T finally laid fiber in my neighborhood. I found this out last month while adding another line to my cellular plan for one of my kids. The agent in the store said “hey, did you know you can get fiber now at your address?”. I signed up on the spot.
Now I get 350 down, 250 up for a lower price than I was paying for 25/5.
I live deep in the rainforest on a Pacific island and we get gigabit internet. Mind you, we lost net for a day last week because some idiots thought they could chop the fibre and make money selling it… no, chumps, no copper there…
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Gotta call Frontier in the morning, let them know that the line they trenched for our DSL has come untrenched. Welcome to the early 21st in the shadow of Research Triangle Park, NC.
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If you don’t have underground cable already it’s just as likely that the fiber lines will be run along the same paths as the cable.
I think a lot of the fairness involved is how available the fiber is to the other customers. If the customers who have fiber available but who haven’t switched yet are paying for some of the costs of making fiber available to them, then this seems fair.
Spreading the costs of installation to customers who won’t have the Fiber available to them seems horrible.
I mean, it’s not fair for the ISP to force customer #1 to pay for the entire infrastructure, then customer 2 pays the incremental $25 for handling a second customer…
(Sorry for the double-reply)
I’m hoping that they will put it in conduit or something to protect the cable that is more squirrel resistant…
It’s why I think the core or carrier level network should be legally separate from the consumer part of it at least. But with the current anti-regulation nonsense in DC it won’t happen at all.
Verizon installed fiber in our neighborhood 8 or 10 years ago. I stuck with DSL for a while; after a particularly heavy rainfall the internet connection was spotty. VZ figured the copper line was degraded, and offered to switch us to FiOS for less than we were paying for DSL (so they would no longer have to maintain the copper).
(Incidentally, VZ inadvertently created a sluice through our neighborhood where FiOS runs down the hill. During heavy rains, the groundwater flushes through this conduit and runs out of our FiOS box at the bottom. The whole damn thing used to float up out of the hole until they replaced the plastic lid with a cement lid.)
ETA:
Shortly before I moved out of Austin (about 17?! years ago) it was getting damn difficult to drive east-west across town (worse than usual, that is). It seemed they chose to dig up two arterial streets at once so someone could lay fiber. Didn’t want to take Koenig because of the construction; meanwhile they were doing some other kind of utility work on North Loop, so that’s out. Tried heading down to 15th and cutting across but, whoops, they’re putting fiber there, too… Around that time, they also talked of putting fiber to every house so they could remotely read the electric meters (the power utility was city-owned). They figured, “hey, while we’re at it, built-in citywide broadband!” But then they just dropped the subject and, AFAIK, nothing else came of it.
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