All these things are related. Back in the 1990s I worked with others to develop DSL technologies (ADSL, HDSL, VDSL) for telcos. Why not fiber, some ask? oh, fiber materials may be sand, but installed fiber is sand, energy, and labor. Installation costs trump everything - use what you have for the physical medium. While we (PairGain) also made point-to-point private links, it was clear then, and even moreso now that m…
Cool to see you here on HN. I hadn't heard the name PairGain since I worked for a small corporate ISP in the early 2000s. We'd recommend PairGain modems for clients who needed seriously high-speed links of 2Mbps! This was just before ADSL and SHDSL were rolled out en masse, or at least well before they were reliable enough for corporate use. We had to organise a special installation of a direct copper line from their…
Relevant article: http://helices.org/commentary/dry_copper_pair.html