There are cheap P2P MW/NIR solution that can provide high bandwidth but it's still not enough.

But they have downsides, range and more importantly density is limited. there is a limit to how many of them you can deploy before they start interfering with one another even tho they are pretty unidirectional put 4-5 of them between 2 buildings and you can start having problems.

The other part is that they aren't as scalable, the main costs of fiber is laying it but you can lay cables with 50-100 fibers at almost the same cost of laying a single fiber.

Fiber can also be upgraded the same cables that gives us 10, 50, a 100 or even a 1000 gbit per second today gave us 1gig or even a 100mbit just some years ago.

The only thing you need to replace are the transmitters and or repeaters if they are used, again those can be expensive but a lot of metro networking equipment is built to be modular and upgradeable the fibers themselves often to not need to be replaced.

Pretty much every upgrade in fiber optics is built around the common diameter and refractive index fibers no one is going to buy into a new technology if they'll have to rip off all of the fibers and put in new ones.

The US and many parts of the world need better networking, it's about time that cities or at least in the case of the US states from local corporations that would deploy the infrastructure and either contract ISP's to do it or do it themselves and lease the lines to them for future use.

Mimosa Networks is a newish Ubiquity competitor and their cheapest offering for a 750mbps is only $300 for the pair of dishes... Needless to say $20k is a pretty dramatic overstatement.

They have a 1.5gbps offering as well in licensed 10.7ghz bands for ~$3k which will dramatically reduce noise and interference, but that's still well within budget. I think to get 10gbps, your're going to need to operate at a higher licensed spectrum where there aren't many commercial people playing yet.

Telecom grade MW P2P links start at 20K and upwards. They do also however work on licensed spectrums. The new un licenses 24 50 and 60 ghz links can be really cheap, but I don't know how well do they compare to the bigger telecom ones. RF equipment is pretty darn expensive to make, the telecom one have pretty impressive "RF dark magic" eco chambers milled out of aluminum blocks and many other cool features. The new commercial ones seem to be pretty simple and mostly solid state not much more complex looking than your typical wifi router. How do they fair with weather and interference how well do they coexist with each other, and how reliable are they in the long run is another question. Some of those MW drums can operate for decades I'm not sure about the 300$ or even the 3000$ ones.

yeah, no. Not in 5 GHz. Sorry to tell you the marketing hype doesn't jive with reality. Two Mimosa B5C radios and two 32dBi dual polarity high performance dishes will make a nice link, and it is awesome to be able to buy a radio link that will do dual polarity 256QAM modulation in 20, 40, 80 MHz wide channels, but it will not be 750 Mbps full duplex.

In the real world more like 250-300 Mbps full duplex, or slightly faster than that if you tell it to allocate greater bandwidth in one direction in a ratio like 75:25.

You can't compare a Mimosa B5-Lite or B5C to a carrier grade ISP, FCC Part 101 licensed band radio (6, 11, 18, 23 GHz etc) that's fed from dual -48VDC A and B power feeds and has multiple SFP slots in it.