All copper in my city is replaced by fiber, and only copper is from the FTTx box in front of my apartment to my flat. Eeerything (landline, internet, IPTV, etc.) runs from a single, dark fiber.
With cabling already in place and VDSL can reliably provide 5 units of bandwidth (where 4 units is used for download and 1 unit is used for upload, e.g. 32/8 mbps), with a theoretical ceiling of 350mbps, I'm pretty happy with what I have.
While I'd love to have fiber at home, I definitely don't want to rerun cabling.
Also, the term looks like it has both meanings.
Having a "dark fiber infrastructure" means having a web of unconnected fiber cables point to point, but since you connect your own devices to it, you don't have to share it with others.
As a result, its presence and its state is only known to you (i.e. it's in the dark).
I understand that my usage is not completely true, but in that context, it's not a flat-out blatant mistake either.
I can't wait until my HFC NBN service here goes the way of the dodo.
While I have 1000mbps down, the 50mbps upload is just miserable. And the cost is painful, $130 AUD a month.
For the price I pay I should be able to have a shared 10000/1000 (in reality it will probably be 2500/1000).
All of this for the swag, I am ,ot likely to use the bandwidth anytime soon (despite serving a few things from home)
This makes it the best option by far for communication in hour-long blackouts when, for instance, cell phones and cellphone towers would have ran down their batteries.
The great thing about this was they could circumvent telecommunications law that requires them to rent out circuits at a competitive rate to small carriers, basically putting the nail in the coffin of small, independent DSL ISPs, since the copper loops are gone. And you, the customer, are now stuck with 6Mbps DSL from a single provider for $80 a month.
Almost everywhere in the US you can get at least 25mbps for less than $80 a month. And within almost all cities and their suburbs, you can easily get 100mbps+ for less than that.
Unbundled network elements was a stupid utopian idea to begin with. No one who knows a lick about broadband policy actually wants to go back to anything like that. The current model is essentially that you're responsible for building your own infrastructure if you want to be an ISP. That has actually spurred an incredible amount of investment in infrastructure across the country, since you know that if you spend a ton of money laying a thousand miles of fiber, you'll be able to reap the rewards of it, not have to rent it out at cost to your competitors.
American internet service is the best or one of the best in the world for a large, populous country. Certainly, the major European powers don't come close (remember when Europe had to beg Netflix and others to reduce video quality to 720p early in the pandemic? US internet service held up perfectly without any throttling.). Only Japan and large parts of China are comparable (again, not counting small or lightly populated countries).
And regardless, while that might be a useful property in certain circumstances, the copper-based NBN we've ended up with is so woeful, that they're basically declaring technical bankruptcy and moving to FTTP after all that in the end anyway. Just a decade late and with billions down the drain for sub-par expensive flaky internet.
I can run 1 Gbps symmetric for ~48h without power by running my optical network terminal (ONT) and a teeny travel router on battery packs. (Used this set up through several long power outages.)
