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How i understand is is Gigabit is two parts: the first part is your home, router, etc supporting the connection speeds. The other is the infrastructure to deliver the gigabit to your home. I can see a regulation that mandates that you wire any new residences up so they can support gigabit, but how is this going to work if the municipality / ISP does not offer it? Not sure about what Gigabit rollout in the UK looks li…
Caveat: fibre is telco infrastructure and is not limited, cable can still be limited ie only virgin media on virgin cable infra
This approach makes a lot of sense. In my county in Maryland, building a new house involves at least $20,000 in fees for sewer and water hookups: https://www.aacounty.org/departments/inspections-and-permits.... Building out fiber to the house is much cheaper in comparison. It seems like a drop in the bucket to integrate a couple of thousand in additional fees for a fiber hookup.
Also, we nearly had gigabit fibre to the home 40 years ago (before anything even needed to run at 1Gbit, or you could afford the transceivers, admittedly) because BT's vision for the future of telephony was to rip out all the copper and run fibre to every single house.
Then the right-wing extremist Thatcher government got wind of the idea and decided that this was too big a monopoly to be allowed to stand, so they stole the entire public property that was BT, smashed it to bits, and sold it off to private industry.
This put back everything by *decades*. Now it's a battle to work out wayleaves, interoperability, who's responsible for what physical plant, and all sorts of other messes. Thanks, Conservatives, fuck you very much.
Instead of what? Everything comes instead of something else. Whatever effort and resources are spent adding gigabit to new homes will mean fewer homes, less food, shoes, medicine, natural gas, cars or whatever. Many people will be celebrating faster internet speeds for those who purchase these new homes, but it's hard to see what goes missing when it's a little here and there from across the economy.
economies are complex. it may be "instead of spending 3x as much to retrofit all these new houses in 10 years when everyone else has gigabit". Sometimes the "economic" decision right now is just punting significantly higher cost of rework down the road.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not particularly, there's very little justification for running copper to new houses given we're in a nationwide rollout of fibre and there's a big cost saving to moving entirely to fibre.
So no need for a law then...
At least this way you can have a good expectation of a new buildings utilities.
Instead of what? Everything comes instead of something else. Whatever effort and resources are spent adding gigabit to new homes will mean fewer homes, less food, shoes, medicine, natural gas, cars or whatever. Many people will be celebrating faster internet speeds for those who purchase these new homes, but it's hard to see what goes missing when it's a little here and there from across the economy.
Not everything is zero-sum.
Sure, it takes effort to wire up every home for Gigabit, but on the other hand you're employing more telco workers to run the cables, creating more jobs. Gigabit costs more, but economy of scale means that average prices will be lower. Increased bandwidth opens up space for new technology innovation, and letting more people effectively work remotely (so less cars on the road).
In practice, from what I've seen in the US, I'd guess this work was probably going to happen anyway. AT&T has been busy running fiber-to-the-home for every major neighborhood in the bay area. (I've gotten 10x the bandwidth, for roughly half the price I was paying for DOCSIS cable internet before.) It wouldn't surprise me if telcos in Europe are on a similar roadmap.
Once the neighborhood fiber line in place on the poles, running a line to an individual house has negligible cost - especially if it's new construction and you're already pulling copper for power/telephone/TV. It took AT&T 30 minutes to do it at my last two houses.
Is this symmetric gigabit or just download? I pay for gigabit down, 35 megabit up. My only other options are starlink or a $10k fiber install.
It doesn't help you, but Hyperoptic are an ISP in the UK with all plans except the lowest being symmetric. I used to pay (moved out of the area^) £28pcm for symmetric 100Mbps, or maybe 150 - either way it was fairly consistently 160/180Mbps as measured. A&A are also by all accounts amazing, but only HN-browsing nerds more impressed with 800M symmetric than 1G are their customers anyway. Hyperoptic I like because they're primarily serving 'the masses' but seem the only non-shitty ones.
^I now use a Mikrotik 4G modem & router. It's not as fast but it's enough, (ongoing) costs even less; I think with some tweaking - especially mounting it outside - I can do better, but it's been so fine that I haven't bothered yet, over the course of months. A lot more asymmetric though, I wouldn't build and push images quite as casually as I might have before.
Just a dumb idea to impose this thinking it will somehow improve the situation overnight. Sadly again I'm not surprised given the location in question.
I think this comes across as shocking to Americans but the thing is the rest of the world treats internet as a utility so most governments try to get cheap and fast internet for as large a portion of the population as possible. Where as US cities and towns are stuck under its isp corporate monopolies.