Quote:
Originally Posted by longislander
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Broadband over Power Lines (aka BPL) is a *very* bad technology, and it fortunately has not been widely deployed.
The only way to provide reliable, very high speed Internet access to lots of users over a wide area is via fiber.
I owned an Internet Service Provider business in the mid-late 1990s. At that time, dialup was still king, DSL was just getting going (at least in my area), and the cable companies were not yet offering Internet access. I had about 3000 dialup customers, about 100 56k DDS customers, and about 25 T-1 customers (1.5 megabits). The problem has always been the "last mile".
Wireless works to some degree, but you need a lot of interconnected access points to make it viable for large numbers of users and still provide high bandwidth. And there is generally a fiber backbone involved.
Even Comcast, at least where I am located, uses physical cable from the street to the house (or a cluster of houses), but the backbone is still fiber and it works very well (albeit, it is expensive).
As compared to Comcast, I find Spectrum (which I have in Tuftonboro) to be quite reasonable. My only complaint is that, after a while, Spectrum will actively throttle network ports that are using a lot of bandwidth. I have a VPN between there and here, and I have to change the VPN port from time to time to get around the throttling. When the port usage stops or slows down, the throttling is lifted. I have not run into this with Comcast.