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Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

How in the world can this be cheaper than running the fiber 100 more feet?

Because every household has copper phone cables run to it already. You can run fiber to the trunk and have high speed communication using existing copper lines.

> XG-FAST can help operators accelerate FTTH deployments, taking fiber very close to customers without the major expense and delays associated with entering every home

How many of those existing copper cables are of high enough quality that they can support anywhere near that speed though? The copper lines in my parents' house are so bad they can't even support a second phone line, much less decent networking speeds.

The copper running to most homes is up to 100 years old and heavily degraded, most houses can't even get ADSL1 speeds let alone ADSL2 or vDSL

You can dig up an alley and re-string from poles with little hassle.

Digging up everyone's yard, replacing lines that might now be running under garages or driveways, and just generally having to operate in people's yard is a lot more work. Especially multiplied by tens or hundreds of thousands of homes.

If you can just trench an alley and run fiber to the nodes then re-use the existing copper for the last 100m that's probably a huge cost savings.

It doesn't require sending out a tech to pull cable through random crawlspaces, for one. If the tech can hook everyone up at the pedestal (or whatever) without having to run cable into the individual houses it will save a ton of money.

Lawyers fees.

Hey, I wasn't joking- well, not that much. You will get more disputes when you deploy across someone else's property, especially if you break or uglify something. That's a serious reason for stopping on public land.

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