The promise of “fiber to the home” is still mostly unrealized, but those trunk lines are out there with oodles of “dark fiber” ready to carry data… someday.
Counterintuitively, I’m seeing “fiber to the home” deployed more in rural an exurb areas. My guess this is because its lower density meaning installing and maintaining copper repeaters becomes more expensive than laying long distance, low maintenance, fiber. Additionally its easier to obtain permits because there is far less existing infrastructure to interfere with right of way and critical services.
We got fiber to the home in our exurb about 4 years ago here in the USA. Its really cheap too. 500Mb/s is $75, 1Gb/s $100, and 5Gb/s I think is $200 per month.
Yeah, it’s not “nowhere” - but it’s really far from “everywhere” considering we’ve been rolling it out for 25 years now. I think you’re right: glass is cheaper than copper these days, and if they’ve got to repair/replace the copper it’s probably cheaper to just run the glass. They put a line down the main road 1/4 mile from our home last year (suburban area in a 1M pop city), and lots of people who live on that main road have gotten fiber to the home service, but they’re not interested in running the extra 1500 feet to reach us yet. I’d guess in our city of 1M, maybe 200,000 have potential fiber to the home service if they want it, the rest of us are stuck with re-heated cable TV co-ax for our broadband.
Counterintuitively, I’m seeing “fiber to the home” deployed more in rural an exurb areas. My guess this is because its lower density meaning installing and maintaining copper repeaters becomes more expensive than laying long distance, low maintenance, fiber. Additionally its easier to obtain permits because there is far less existing infrastructure to interfere with right of way and critical services.
We got fiber to the home in our exurb about 4 years ago here in the USA. Its really cheap too. 500Mb/s is $75, 1Gb/s $100, and 5Gb/s I think is $200 per month.
Yeah, it’s not “nowhere” - but it’s really far from “everywhere” considering we’ve been rolling it out for 25 years now. I think you’re right: glass is cheaper than copper these days, and if they’ve got to repair/replace the copper it’s probably cheaper to just run the glass. They put a line down the main road 1/4 mile from our home last year (suburban area in a 1M pop city), and lots of people who live on that main road have gotten fiber to the home service, but they’re not interested in running the extra 1500 feet to reach us yet. I’d guess in our city of 1M, maybe 200,000 have potential fiber to the home service if they want it, the rest of us are stuck with re-heated cable TV co-ax for our broadband.