Kluya wrote:
It seems in the UK this 100mb+ is actually “fiber to the home”. This means the company had to go back and place fiber through the whole neighborhood, and run new fiber drops to each house.
They started doing it (at least in my area) something like 15 years ago. A company called Telewest bought up most of the other cable providers in the country, formed an alliance with the remaining providers (NTL), and then literally went into each and every neighbourhood, dug up every single street, and installed fiber optic cable.
They didn't remove any of the copper cable used by the existing telecoms providers, and they didn't wire it up to everyone's houses or anything, they just made sure every street had the cable running through it. If you sign up they dig up your front garden to split a cable from the main cable and run it up to your house. That was all 15 years ago, while the fastest "home broadband" possible was around 512kb/sec.
We're still using the same cable today for 100MB+/sec.
Last I remember reading, the theoretical maximum speed of the cable infrastructure is something like 1.5Gb/sec per home, once we have the technology to stick on either end of the cable. That was some pretty damn good future proofing.
The cable is actually all in the sidewalks, not the road, so it didn't cause as much disruption as you might think it would have. And yeah having a smaller country helped a lot. To this day its still not available everywhere though, there are areas of the country that are considered a bit too out of the way or rural to bother cabling. But if your area has fibre optic cable, you're set.
ADSL, which is what they use to run over copper cable still these days has the horrible limitation that it's speed is determined by how far away from the nearest phone exchange you are. Living next door to one gets you 24 Mbps; but living on the other side of town gets you more like 2 Mbps.
Fibre doesn't have that problem, so it's really the only answer going forward. Eventually someone's gotta come along and dig your streets up and get real cable fitted, just needs to be done.