Penny Arcade - Comic - Fibrous
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Fibrous
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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The plot thickens...
Sounds a lot like MoCA adapters and they work pretty well if your house wire isn't 2 old.
Its less the Fiber companies trying to find reasons not to install. Remember, their entire business model is based on installing to as many customers as possible. If they don't install, they can't make money. Its more about the local, county, and state regulations they have to push through. Infrastructure projects are difficult to coordinate under the best of circumstances. And when you have a product like fibre, that will absolutely each the lunch of the current utility providers, providers who allocate a significant portion of their own operating budgets lobbying those same local, county, and state legislators.....well you can see how things are often held up.
While I generally agree that they want as many customers as possible, it's a cost/benefit thing. It sounds like they had already installed fiber "in his neighborhood" (said so in a very long ago strip/post). But for some reason, they didn't install it to him. It's entirely possible that the amount of extra time (aka money) they needed for that could be better spent on installing fiber to a hundred other people instead.
Even with an installation date in hand, you might be at the mercy of the local utilities. Maybe they get someone out there, before that date, to mark where various lines are run up to your home, and maybe the installer shows up and finds they haven't been out that way yet.
Anyone who doubts the ability of a power/water/sewer/other public utility to tie things up into bureaucratic knots has very little experience with something actually going wrong.
Or they get out there to dig, get a little ways down, and run into ground somehow still frozen solid in the Spring, being shaded by trees. Or into solid rock. At least a glowing alien skull can be moved.
Plus technicians and equipment don't grow on trees, and they can easily have a backlog of people who have been waiting even longer. It's the downstream effect of wanting a service who can not piggyback on existing infrastructure and is competing against already established actors. But if one has always lived in an area where infrastructure for POTS, cable, and other utilities were already in existence, this gets easy to take for granted.
Ironically it was easier for my small town to get on fiber than it was for larger nearby towns because my town never had some of those already in place to muck things up. Most people had maybe landline phone and maybe at best satellite television like Dish Network. So wireless and fiber internet had a way easier time getting established.
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