4 ms·

It’s not so simplistic. It may make perfectly good sense to pull out copper and push in fiber. It costs money to run and maintain a copper network. Fiber netw

It’s not so simplistic. It may make perfectly good sense to pull out copper and push in fiber. It costs money to run and maintain a copper network. Fiber networks are less costly to operate and maintain. In a rational world copper would be replaced immediately with fiber when total cost of ownership over the lifetime of the asset is less for fiber than copper.

fulafel 7y ago
Let's not get hung on fiber vs copper, the same type of advances make radio and copper carry more BW. But we are not deploying faster signaling on copper fast enough either, due to lack of investment and resulting slowdown of copper speedups making it to the market.
- iptrans 7y ago
  No they don’t. Technological advances make copper and radio carry more bandwidth OVER SHORTER DISTANCES. This is why WISP are deploying micro POPs and cellular carriers are deploying small cells. This is a huge difference compared to fiber where the same infrastructure will scale from 100M to 100G. Forklift upgrades and truck rolls are expensive. Copper and radio aren’t like fiber where swapping a $9 optic for a $19 optic makes you go from 1G to 10G. All this makes a massive difference in TCO in fiber’s favor over the lifetime of the assets. Providing fixed line service over copper or radio is silly in the long term as each upgrade requires you to build out fiber closer and closer to the end user bit by bit. Better to do it at once and reap the benefits, both in terms of service and costs. Not deploying faster signaling in copper networks is also a misstatement. Cable networks are busy splitting nodes, deploying more fiber and upgrading to faster versions of DOCSIS all the time. Most telcos have already transitioned to fiber and are not building out copper anymore. Here the US is an outlier, as the telcos here are just milking the existing copper assets for revenues until they exit the business.

fulafel 7y ago

Let's not get hung on fiber vs copper, the same type of advances make radio and copper carry more BW. But we are not deploying faster signaling on copper fast enough either, due to lack of investment and resulting slowdown of copper speedups making it to the market.

iptrans 7y ago
No they don’t. Technological advances make copper and radio carry more bandwidth OVER SHORTER DISTANCES. This is why WISP are deploying micro POPs and cellular carriers are deploying small cells. This is a huge difference compared to fiber where the same infrastructure will scale from 100M to 100G. Forklift upgrades and truck rolls are expensive. Copper and radio aren’t like fiber where swapping a $9 optic for a $19 optic makes you go from 1G to 10G. All this makes a massive difference in TCO in fiber’s favor over the lifetime of the assets. Providing fixed line service over copper or radio is silly in the long term as each upgrade requires you to build out fiber closer and closer to the end user bit by bit. Better to do it at once and reap the benefits, both in terms of service and costs. Not deploying faster signaling in copper networks is also a misstatement. Cable networks are busy splitting nodes, deploying more fiber and upgrading to faster versions of DOCSIS all the time. Most telcos have already transitioned to fiber and are not building out copper anymore. Here the US is an outlier, as the telcos here are just milking the existing copper assets for revenues until they exit the business.