Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Anywhere that has wired Electricity can have fibre. It's cheaper now to install fibre than copper phone cable and less likely to be stolen. Almost no scrap value.
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That will vary by country.
There is "rural", rural, and "RURAL!!!" .
In the US there are many places with less than 10 customers per mile and often dozens of miles between customers. At US$20,000 per mile for the turnk and $600 to connect the customer, the result is extremely high prices and extremely low speeds.
The need is big enough that LEO satellite constellations are projected to rake on $30Billion a year.
https://www.youtube.com/watchv=tufs0zowybg
As for 5G there is more to it than just "slightly better LTE". It has multiple layers, some low bandwidth/low latency (for autonomous auto communicstions and IoD) others very high bandwith/short range, using milimeter wave transmitters every few hundred feet. Some of the wireless carriers are instaling their nodes on light posts and traffic signals in urban and suburban areas and wiring up individual developments.
Both Verizon and AT&T are launching 5G Home Broadband in the US:
https://www.verizon.com/5g/home/
https://www.howtogeek.com/428337/not...and-explained/
The cable companies may think they have an eternal monopoly to mint money but the wireless and big tech companies intend to dispute this. That monopoly money is a big inducement. Starlink, in particular, is going after the premium, ultra low latency customers (bog bucks), and opportunistically picking off regular bandwidth customers elsewhere. The system needs massive constellations to serve the big bucks customers and in the process provide excess capacity they can sell cheap. (That is how Amazon ramped up AWS, by renting out their own excess capacity. It'll work for Starlink and probably Kuiper, too.)
As usual, big tech is playing "what's mine is mine, what's yours is up for grabs".