All the traditional 2-wire telco's are rather SOL at this point, where I think most have transitioned to fiber for anything new.  If they aren't, they might as well go home as it is end of life technology and was 20 years ago.

Next up, Starlink (Tesla/Musk) is going to start soaking up that old/rural residential service like yours where the inept telco can't get you above 20mbps, and unlike legacy satellite internets (hughes, etc), there isn't massive latency as these are Low-Earth Orbit, so more real ~30-60ms RTT times.  Amazon is trying to get in on the action now too, but a bit late to the game.

AT&T can start watching another wave of massive abandonment of their services ala their Phone and Dish TV services, but now internet too.  And I say good riddance to a cling-on parasite.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/08/spacex-starlink-beta-tests-show-speeds-up-to-60mbps-latency-as-low-as-31ms/

-mb


On Tue, Aug 18, 2020 at 4:02 PM Jim via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

I've read articles saying AT&T is planning on abandoning their copper in rural areas when it fails and instead transitioning landline customers in those reas to VOIP adapters that will use their 4G network.  Here in Tennessee there are lots of hills and not so many people living around them.  I know one guy who lives between 2 hills and has no cell service at home.  When the landline goes down, he has to drive to the top of either hill where he gets cell service to call AT&T.  If they're paying so little attention to their existing network, I can't picture them spending a fortune to build the tower necessary to provide service to all their customers out in the hills.

On 8/18/20 3:03 PM, Thomas Scott via PLUG-discuss wrote:
That seems to be the grand irony of fiber - you can have a nationwide backbone with thousands of Gb/s of bandwidth running on your street, and as you said Jim - be a hundred yards short of 25 Mbps. I don't buy a ton of the 5G we're going to fix all the things but if fixed broadband could become a reality in the mid-band spectrum, there might be a new last mile in town (and I would move much farther out to the country). 

- Thomas Scott | mr.thomas.scott@gmail.com 

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