AT&T has a copper wire connected to my house but they refuse to offer me any service at all because they “dOnT oFfEr DsL aNyMoRe.” Shitty DSL is shitty DSL but it’s better than nothing. At least I have access to Cable but ai knows plenty of people who don’t. That shit should be illegal.
Comment on ISPs seeking government handouts try to avoid offering low-cost broadband
reddig33@lemmy.world 1 month agoI’ve read there’s lots of “dark” fiber in cities, but I don’t know if it’s true. I do know that AT&T has a fiber line that runs through my neighborhood, yet I can’t get fiber internet. Really stupid.
jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
amanda@aggregatet.org 1 month ago
I have the same situation almost. We have fiber from Telia delivered to the basement of our apartment building where it’s converted to cable by Tele2, who rents access to Telia’s fiber. Neither of them were willing to sell me or the organisation that owns the building access to fiber, even though it would have required only activating an outlet on whatever fiber switch thing they have in the basement.
Tele2 also has a monopoly on internet access; it’s that or 4G/5G.
SirDerpy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I do know that AT&T has a fiber line that runs through my neighborhood, yet I can’t get fiber internet
The local exchange carriers (LECs) typically change from plain olds telephone system (POTS) to fiber at the neighborhood level. Coax carriers also.
Fiber to the neighborhood is already there. It’s not hard to run a line across a neighborhood to connect whatever on either side.
The difficult part is getting from a neighborhood connection to each individual home. It’s a flower pot install on each property, all connected together underground, and it can’t fuck with gas, water, sewer, etc.
reddig33@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Seems like they could connect something wireless to the fiber to provide internet to the home.
SirDerpy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The entire cellular network, particularly T-Mo 5G unlimited, would put it to shame. If one wants better then Starlink.
The way to do wireless would be to form a neighborhood ISP, put up a tower, then wireless P2P to each home. I’ve seen it in a few places. More common is citywide wifi.
PriorityMotif@lemmy.world 1 month ago
That’s called a WISP
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
It’s also not hard to use that fibre connection to the neighbourhood to provide DSL. That’s precisely what it’s made for: Use that copper last mile and have whatever on the upstream side. And there’s plenty of DSL hardware that doubles as POTS and/or ISDN hardware, you can upgrade the whole neighbourhood to “DSL available” by installing such a thing, connecting all the lines to it, and then remotely activating DSL when people sign up.
Over here they’re actually moving away from that, opting for voip instead and using DSL over the whole frequency spectrum.
SirDerpy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
As soon as those decades old and severely degraded copper lines are replaced in all of those old neighborhoods where fiber is slowest to roll out, DSL can provide a higher cost and subpar service on a deprecated standard. That’s exactly what we need with a surplus of capacity on modern hardware already deployed in the field.
We’ll all have broadband in no time if they’d just listen to you.
barsoap@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Earthworks are expensive, doubly so if you need specialised techs because fibre isn’t easy to install much less splice. If you get fibre to within 200-500m of the property G.Fast will deliver 100Mbit to 1Gbit, which is way faster than most people are willing to pay for. And that’s old tech in fact most plans for FTTH are actually FTTF, that is, fibre only reaches the property border, then you get a copper cable from there using XG-FAST, a single-user DSL installation. Expect something on the order of 8Gbit/s. Which is an amount of speed most people’s PCs can’t even deal with, 1Gbit NICs are still the norm with 2.5G making slow inroads.
Things might be a bit different in the US because suburbia and those ludicrously sparse neighbourhoods, yep going directly to fibre at least to the property border probably makes sense there. But in the city? Provide fibre to a block, the rest of the infrastructure can be reused. It’s not cheap to run fibre through apartment building hallways, either, and no running Ethernet on those copper lines is a much worse idea, ethernet can’t deal gracefully with interference and shoddy copper.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 month ago
“Whats this?”
“Thats the fiber line.”
“Oh, cool. Can I get fiber?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“We’d need some federal grants to run some fiber first.”
“But the fiber is right here.”
“We need that for other people to get fiber.”
“Well, why can’t I access it too?”
“Ugh! I told you! We need public money to our multibillion dollar company to use this fiber line thats already here!”
“I don’t understand…”
“You wouldn’t.”