Excellent write up. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

This.

You’d be surprised how much of a place’s physical infrastructure depends on a physical line. Automated fire alerts for high rises, security alarms, remote access for gates and doors, backup phone connections. A lot of this still uses old physical lines because it is easy to fix and highly reliable.

Now consider the infrastructure needed for specialized services like EMS, police, secure and classified buildings, federal agencies, embassies, smart traffic signals. Shutting down a network like that has massive implications for anything in society that relies on it, which is well beyond your cell phone plan.

Until fiber or celluar can have the same reliability as copper, then we can switch.

Thanks, Kohl.

Literally. For those who don't know it was Helmut Kohl (chancellor during the reunification) who stopped a 30-year project to lay fiber throughout Germany to instead favour copper wires to help his old pal Leo Kirch build up a private TV network to rival the mostly left leaning public broadcast. And I thought one of his family members owned a copper plant or so but I wasn't able to find an article about that.

you can't expect more from T aka DT... Here in budapest i could only get copper cable T net, if the romanian (Digi) wouldn't give us optical cable (however orban already chased them away, so i expect worse, since orban's firm which bought their network, doubled the subscription price in 1 year).

Modern ADSL and VDSL can get you pretty far... But they don't hold a candle to fibre.

didn't Verizon overbuild most, if not all, of the area with FiOS? not sure how they're getting away with it in the rural regions unless there are still CLECs operating. All this to say... fiber still has the issue of power outages and nonfunctioning customer backup batteries in the ONTs and I vaguely remember some drama over Verizon not offering replacement batteries or providing backups at all.