Re: And thus the problem
"There is no downside to using dry copper pairs between the street and the premises when you're talking about distances of a couple hundred meters and frequencies of a few MHz"
Except we're long past "a few MHz" and a hell of a long way past "a couple hundred metres"
And that's only half the story anyway - since it was installed, my VDSL speed has dropped by 25% on a 150m connection simply as a result of interference from _other_ VDSL circuits.
This isn't a new phenomenon - Back in the early 1980s when I was working in Telco side stuff, we found that you could only put 8 2MB/s trunk circuits in a cable before they interfered with each other. The alternative was substantially reducing the distance between regenerators (as in less than half) - and this was a major driver of deploying fibre, as fibre links would go the entire distance without a repeater and without relying on the electricity supply to each of those repeaters going titsup.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
