[repiret]

Last summer the local cable company replaced all their cables in town in order to begin offering digital cable and internet service. I was flabbergasted that they they spent all that money on linemen but still ran coax rather than fiber. As far as I can tell talking to their linemen, its not even FTTN, just FTT-central-office.

Assuming its not run by morons, which I'll accept is a bit of a stretch for a cable company, there must be some other reason to not run fiber for new installations.

[Aloha]

Cost and Fragility.

You can push around 1GHz of bandwidth on the normal hardline-feed line with taps system cable uses, each node is designed to pass by a certain number of households.

Coax is.. cheap, forgiving, easy to terminate, and inexpensive to replace - Fiber is more expensive, unforgiving, and much harder to terminate.

[rodgerd]

https://www.chorus.co.nz/tools-support/broadband-tools/broad...

New Zealand has fibre to the home for the majority of a country the side of the eastern seaboard of the US, with only 5 million people, and a lower per-capita GDP.

It's doable. It's just a question of wanting to.

[Aloha]

Its just not as efficient, you can deliver similar classes of service by HFC networks.

[robocat]

I was initially a skeptic of the cost of Fibre-To-The-Premises, but in hindsight for New Zealand (≈Oregon) I think a national rollout of fibre was very effective[3][4].

AFAIK fibre is more resilient to catastrophes (like earthquakes[1][2] in Christchurch or California), and having a high speed residential fibre network definitely helped during Covid.

I am uncertain what you mean by “efficient”. Perhaps link to something that backs up your opinion?

[1] https://az659834.vo.msecnd.net/eventsaircancprod/production-...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sonia-Giovinazzi-2/publ...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29791864

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25339491

[rodgerd]

Australia and New Zealand have helpfully agreed to provide a case study in which works best. Mixed fibre and copper in Australia is slower and ended up costing dramatically more than it was supposed to.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

I think it's just inertia. At higher speeds you have to do so much signal processing going over copper, that it iss costing more and more energy compared to optical. Which is limited to 2.5 Watts per port and end of the fiber, at least in common prosumer facing gear. While you can push up to 80KM(or meanwhile even more!) in one run with such stuff, depending on the used fibre and wavelength.

Speaking about optical modules in this formfactor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_form-factor_pluggable_tr...

[GreyStache]

Regarding the termination: our local fiber provider handles the termination with some optical precision connector (forgot the name). Both to the sunken-in-sidewalk multiplexer and in the home to the optical termination point (both gpon). So for mass deployments fiber connections do not require fibre welds are not required.

I have to see it play out in practice and I'm not a fan of the idea that one telco controls controls (ie stifles competition) in a gpon scenario. The conduit has recently been placed in our street, so "soon"...

[Aloha]

I'm still a fan for cost reasons of FTTN, because I think with Coax in the last mile, you can deliver fantastic performance, so long as you're not also trying to delivery video too.

Furthermore if you actually run Coax in duct for buried circuits, its easy to replace with fiber later.

[bayindirh]

Our telco converted all its infra to FTTN via fiber. So, I've actually have fiber connection up to the front of my building, then it's terminated and distributed via VDSL to the street.

I have a 50/8 mbps connection at home and, it gives all the performance it can give. The telco keeps the speeds a bit higher to handle VDSL overhead, so we have a real 50/8 mbps IP connection at premises.

I'd rather not rewire my home and use existing equipment (which can handle 350mpbs), rather than bringing in fragile fiber into the home.

[xenadu02]

This sounds like post-hoc rationalization.

I have Sonic fiber in SF. 1Gbps symmetric, over a "fragile fiber" run directly into my home. It works quite well. The drop cable is pre-made in standard lengths with weatherproof connectors. The glass is embedded in a large-ish diameter substrate that resists sharp bends naturally so the installers don't need to take special care to prevent losses, just don't try to force the cable to bend beyond what it wants to do (very different from your standard fiber patch cables in a switch room). It is robust enough you could cable staple it to a wall without issue. Terminates in a tiny ONT that gives me Ethernet on my side.

They're deploying 10Gbps for all new installs and I'm eagerly awaiting my upgrade. No change to the fiber itself are required, just swapping equipment on both ends. This same fiber can do 100Gbps in the future if the need arises, possibly more. No coax plant can come close. The fact that an independent ISP can do this for $40/month and make money at it proves the economics.

There is no reason not to run fiber unless you're more focused on rent extraction than investing in your business... at least in suburbs and cities. (See ATT's public comments and focus on milking wireless while dis-investing in physical plant as an example of goosing profits because they don't face real competition in most of their service area).

[bayindirh]

> This sounds like post-hoc rationalization.

Uhm, no, it's not.

I'm using a 1gbps symmetric connection at the office, for the last decade or so. The network speed is limited by my NIC and the cabling to the switch. The network at the office has more bandwidth (we're the network backbone).

We have fiber ran into our apartment buildings. My apartment's termination box is at the wall across my flat door. On the other hand, the speed I can get from that fiber is not higher than the current VDSL offerings, and they both cap at 100mbps downstream (upstream is probably limited at the same speeds with VDSL). Since the FTTN box is also outside, the speeds and stability from that VDSL connection is rock solid.

For no apparent speed advantage, I need to terminate a thick fiber, and need to run it in the open across the house, drilling walls in the process, or move my house's whole internet infrastructure near it. Both are illogical given the floor plan of my house.

Then comes the equipment part. Again, I'll need to change my core router at home and change everything (I have a mesh network at home), or cascade it to ISPs fiber router, which is another box, more cables, and more management. If the ISP allows me to use my own router, I'd need a media converter from fiber to copper. Which's again more cables, more boxes, more management.

As a result, I'd rather use my house's in-wall cabling to get the speeds I'm happy with instead of getting a shiny (pun intended) technology with no speed advantage.

If the speeds offered here changes over time, I can re-evaluate my choices, but as the xDSL technology gets better, I'm guessing that it'll keep the same speeds with fiber offerings, at least for residential stuff in my area. So, I project that I can upgrade my network speeds at least for a decade without changing my network equipment or cabling.

[Aloha]

Does Sonic own their own fiber network?

[toast0]

When AT&T did a fiber overlay in San Jose (GPON), they had neighborhood cables that were factory terminated to go from wherever to each pole. The linemen had to setup the pulleys? and pull the cable through, and attach them, but they didn't have to terminate them. When they ran a line to my house, they did do a field termination, but it seemed like they had a tool and it went quickly (mine was the tech's first time, or at least pretty early, but it only took a minute or so).

Of course, for repair work, if a tree or something breaks a multi fiber bundle, splicing is going to be a lot harder than coax. Probably harder than traditional phone lines, but I think PON is setup so that you don't need to care which wire connects to which other wire, and if you do that for end-user traditional phone lines, you'll have a big mess, so you'd really want to match the wires up before you junction them. Coax is just one big wire, so way simpler.

[jcrawfordor]

DOCSIS is capable of 3gbps over coaxial cable and there is more room to improve, so fiber doesn't have a significant advantage in terms of possible bandwidth. Because DOCSIS was designed to operate on the cable network, which was designed to reach a very large number of homes, the architecture of the system tends to be more cost-effective than fiber. The fiber equivalent of a cable-like topology, and what is used by fiber ISPs, is PON, but PON is actually relatively limited in terms of both range and number of service points compared to DOCSIS on cable. A typical PON installation requires more field equipment to serve the same customers at the same rate compared to DOCSIS.

This is made worse by the issue of power distribution: the field equipment for DOCSIS consists of distribution amplifiers which are powered over the coaxial cable itself, allowing the battery-backed power supplies to be placed at convenient locations. There's not really any equivalent of this for PON, so extending PON networks beyond a single loop (depends a lot but typically a few KM and <100 customers) requires an OLT which is relatively large and needs separate power provisioned. You can put OLTs in serving area cabinets but this is costlier compared to cable equipment.

Another major factor is the customer premises: most homes already have coaxial cable distribution installed that is either compatible with DOCSIS 3 or can be made compatible with DOCSIS 3 by replacing the distribution amplifier or passive tap, which is a fairly cheap and fast operation. Installing PON to customers requires getting fiber to their house, and then either an outdoor ONT (troublesome from a maintenance perspective) and ethernet into the building or fiber into the building. The equipment here doesn't necessarily cost much but the labor of running new lines into customer homes is substantial and makes signing up new customers much higher-friction.

Most of the time when a cable provider upgrades to introduce DOCSIS 3 for digital voice and internet they aren't really replacing any cable anyway, just distribution amplifiers and nodes. The cost of this work is significantly lower than running new cable and it doesn't require new pole attachment agreements etc.

In general, in urban environments with existing cable TV plant there are few upsides to fiber. Urban fiber in existing areas is usually only cost effective when it's a new ISP competing with the cable company.

Finally, most DOCSIS networks are in a process of transitioning from CMTS (cable modem termination system, the upstream end) in the cable headend to a compact serving area CMTS at each amplifier point. This is called "Node+0" architecture, meaning there is a fiber node and then zero distribution amplifiers before the customer. One of the nice things about the cable "HFC" or hybrid fiber/coaxial network is that it is relatively easy to make this transition progressively as you sign up additional customers, since CMTS nodes have been made very small. PON is less forgiving this way and requires more up-front capacity planning, especially since network expansion means the permitting process on relatively large curb cabinets or enclosures.