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> Likely coaxial networks will become an antique of an older era. the same way POTS (plain old telephone service) did.

DSL will become the antique thing since you can't go much more than 50 MBit/s outside of urban areas with short distances due to piss poor old cables, while DOCSIS can already deliver 10 GBit/s over way longer distances because the shielded cable allows way more effective transmission.

Upgrades (aka splitting the trunk to provide more bandwidth to the customers on one branch) are relatively easy to do, whereas upgrading 5G capacity is a legal hellhole - you need permits, pay rent to whomever's house you're setting up the cell, and the base station and antenna hardware is expensive.

Don't get me wrong, 5G will be extremely useful for rural areas as it's way cheaper to build out than wiring up houses with DSL/cable... but where there is cable (and the cable is somewhat-ish affordable), people will choose cable over 5G.




>but where there is cable (and the cable is somewhat-ish affordable), people will choose cable over 5G.

I think you may be surprised. In my old area, people are leaving Comcast in droves for T-Mobile's 5G service, not because it's all that much better or all that much cheaper, but because they've been taking it from Comcast for two decades now and they finally have an opportunity to show their displeasure.


And if it doesn't work out after a few months they can go back to Comcast and qualify for new customer promos. There's no contract requirement on the T-Mobile service.


That sounds like "where the cable is affordable and they don't have a long-standing, heavily justified grudge against the company running it", which is a fair caveat, but doesn't seem to invalidate the parent's underlying claim.


How many good years do we have left until comcast purchases t-mobile?




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