I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's also not obvious to me that wireless is better in dense areas, especially since the main cost in wired internet is laying the cable in the first place, which is easier to do cost effectively when you have an urban market to offer service to.

In either case, the channels still have capacity limits. I'm not saying it's impossible, which is partly why I brought it up in the first place. I was hoping someone more knowledgeable would chime in. The main advantage wires have is you can just run more of them when you reach your capacity (or in some cases you can just change the hardware at either end of the wire to newer technology).

The bandwidth is only limited per tower, you can easily double the throughput of a given area by doubling the number of cell towers (and reducing power to avoid interference). It’s a lot cheaper to build a new tower than to run new wires to 200 homes (permits and all). On top of that 5g gives 10x bandwidth over 4g in the same band.

You can have 1,000 wires in a bit of pipe, effectively 1,000 "spectrums." The air will always only be a single spectrum.

Cell division does not scale infinitely, and becomes more and more complex to manage.

Running cable you do once, then you can benefit for a long time. Wired will always be the better technical solution, and more economic one, in built up areas.

Is Comcast really that bad? In my admittedly European experience all the service providers are (dis)functional and greedy pretty much to the same degree, none of them are good guys.

I now have Verizon and the difference is vast. The service has gone down twice in five years. When I called it in, I was immediately connected to someone who knew what DHCP meant. They’re not perfect but they’re a lot better.

All of these traditional telcos are garbage and their ratings in multiple arenas showcase that very clearly.

AT&T has U-Verse DSLAMS in some corners, but gave up on covering the entire town and the copper network is old and crumbling. There is zero hope of any kind of fiber service showing up.

In my personal experience Comcast's service isn't bad, but their rates are tied to the fact that there is no competition. My belief is that prices would drop about 50% and speeds would jump up 20% if another company could get into the space.

And that's just for IP service. Video service is another story altogether. TMO's purchase of Layer3 gives me some hope that maybe there will be a decent streaming service they will bundle with it.

Yep. My town has exactly one provider: Comcast. They even negotiated a 50-year exclusive right of way back in the 80s by lining some local politician pockets.

I pay $250/month for internet, landline phone, and basic cable bundle.

This includes about $50 worth of bullshit “copper recovery fees” and the like which are designed to sound like taxes but are really just pure profit for Comcast.

There are plenty of horror stories, however. I may just be lucky so far.

The rebrand to Xfinity is a joke.

TMO (yeah Austria, not US but still) were bragging about not hashing passwords on twitter just a couple of weeks ago. Not exactly professional.

It's basically like comic book villainy, the only thing missing is photos of Comcast Executives cackling over the complaints from customers. And I say that as someone who was overall okay with Comcast's service the one time I had them. The behavior of Comcast defines the perception most of the US has with them.

Yeah... about that: https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/t-mobile-reiterates-...

I'm curious as to how expensive implementation will be for municipal providers.