Well, copper at least has the very nice property of only requiring electricity at the central phone node, and still have working communications.
This makes it the best option by far for communication in hour-long blackouts when, for instance, cell phones and cellphone towers would have ran down their batteries.
Actually the big ILECs like Verizon started deprecating copper loops, at least when I was in that industry 10 years ago. They would install a box in a neighborhood with fiber backhaul to the Central Office and a mini DSLAM, and then deliver shitty DSL from said box.
The great thing about this was they could circumvent telecommunications law that requires them to rent out circuits at a competitive rate to small carriers, basically putting the nail in the coffin of small, independent DSL ISPs, since the copper loops are gone. And you, the customer, are now stuck with 6Mbps DSL from a single provider for $80 a month.
>And you, the customer, are now stuck with 6Mbps DSL from a single provider for $80 a month.
Almost everywhere in the US you can get at least 25mbps for less than $80 a month. And within almost all cities and their suburbs, you can easily get 100mbps+ for less than that.
Unbundled network elements was a stupid utopian idea to begin with. No one who knows a lick about broadband policy actually wants to go back to anything like that. The current model is essentially that you're responsible for building your own infrastructure if you want to be an ISP. That has actually spurred an incredible amount of investment in infrastructure across the country, since you know that if you spend a ton of money laying a thousand miles of fiber, you'll be able to reap the rewards of it, not have to rent it out at cost to your competitors.
American internet service is the best or one of the best in the world for a large, populous country. Certainly, the major European powers don't come close (remember when Europe had to beg Netflix and others to reduce video quality to 720p early in the pandemic? US internet service held up perfectly without any throttling.). Only Japan and large parts of China are comparable (again, not counting small or lightly populated countries).
Maybe there are some details I'm missing but I live in a small town in Southern Europe (population 2500) and I have symmetrical 600Mbps FFTH for 50€/month with one cell line included. And they are almost real, I peak at ~550Mbps
There's a lot more to robust internet service than what you get on speedtest.net or in optimal conditions. Further, the internet speed statistics show that European internet service is on average slower than American service. It's great that you good service, but the point I'm making is that American service is on average faster and more robust, and we got there by abandoning the unbundled network elements nonsense.
I'm suspicious of this statement, what you count as Europe, and also of how you've focused on the mean (average), which is heavily affected by large outliers. The median feels more useful in cases like these. Also you haven't even cited your data source.
But even if speeds were equivalent or better in the US, prices in the US are still multiples of European prices for the same service.
I'm equally suspicious, made even worse by stating completely factless things like "more robust".
Also what's available and what I'm purchasing is different. I'd pay about 35$ for uncapped 100/100 and that's enough for me. But everywhere where you can get 100 you can also get 1000 for maybe 90$ a month. I don't want 1000 because it's useless for my use case, and I don't have anything to prove so instead of wasting money I'm staying on 100, I think most people are because it's just enough. There's also 250 and 500 inbetween which some might get too.
This is Sweden, which is supposedly 50 Mbit behind the US (x for doubt)
I'd also like to remind you that we have something called net neutrality, so our isps aren't allowed to prioritize speedtesting services any different than anything else.
Net neutrality went out the window the moment Net backbone operators reached for DPI (Deep Packet Inspection), traffic shaping, and QoS (some workloads get prioritized over others).
It's a beautiful ideal to reach for, but it's expensive, because it implies actually investing in infrastructure instead of exec bonuses.
I think that's what we're doing in Sweden and many parts of Europe. I have 1-2 ms to Cloudflare within Stockholm, had 5-6ms 340km away, I highly doubt my traffic goes though inspection steps on the way.
We're also apparently building out train infrastructure quite extensively in Europe, and when you lay down train tracks you lay every other piece of infra down with it.
I'm all for private actors and all that, but not when the actors are allowed to pay politicians to not regulate them.
Oh, yeah, that can be fun, in theory I can have at the same time :
- 4 different fiber ISPs (in practice only 2-3, because 2-3 of them are sharing the same fiber line)
- 1 ADSL on the copper line
- up to 4 5G connections
- who knows how many satellite connections
That would be total overkill for 99+% of the people of course, but it's really nice to have 0 downtime when switching ISPs because the previous one still works when you start using the new one !
Tell that to how my NBN seems to be setup. With a blackout, our internet is gone too even though my modem (and home server) are on a UPS. Wonder what causes that.
And regardless, while that might be a useful property in certain circumstances, the copper-based NBN we've ended up with is so woeful, that they're basically declaring technical bankruptcy and moving to FTTP after all that in the end anyway. Just a decade late and with billions down the drain for sub-par expensive flaky internet.
This is true also for fiber. Depending on the ISP fiber setup, the fiber can run for many 10's of km without a power relay.
I can run 1 Gbps symmetric for ~48h without power by running my optical network terminal (ONT) and a teeny travel router on battery packs. (Used this set up through several long power outages.)
This makes it the best option by far for communication in hour-long blackouts when, for instance, cell phones and cellphone towers would have ran down their batteries.