In North America, getting a decent Internet connection usually means comparing the two options (for 78% of Americans – see main article), which tend to be DSL from the local telco or cable Internet from the cable company. Providing an Internet connection over telephone lines or cable is a hack, as both were built to transmit specific types of information in analog form: point-to-point voice and broadcast video, respectively. The physical layout of the wires also reflects the use case: a star topology in the case of telephone, for communicating directly with the telco, and a ring topology in the case of cable, used to reduce the amount of wire, since all nodes were receiving the same information. Neither of these is ideal for an Internet connection, as the speed of DSL drops the further you are from the telco building and the bandwidth available to cable subscribers is necessarily shared with your neighbors. Other options exist, but are similarly limited. Broadband over power lines is not widely deployed and satellite broadband has high latency and degrades in adverse weather conditions.
Fiber-to-the-home is gradually replacing these other methods of providing consumer Internet connections. However, not all fiber services are created equal. Here are the main areas where fiber deployments differ (from each other and from cable/DSL), some that you would expect and some you might not:
Continue reading ‘Realizing the potential of fiber-to-the-home’
