Fiber Optic Cable The Best Solution - Letter

Falmouth Opinion, Falmouth Enterprise

In case you missed it, I wrote a letter last week that cited Enterprise articles about a town fiber optic internet proposal. I suggested that fiber optic would be expensive, and new wireless internet would/could be cheaper.

The letter got me into a good conversation with David Isenberg, one of the people working on the town internet infrastructure plan. I know David from other things (especially music) around Falmouth, so it was fun to talk tech. Anyway, I learned a number of things worth sharing.

First, I learned that fiber optics on the poles is not particularly exotic nor expensive as these things go. It’s 30-year infrastructure. So the cost is well spread out and the fibers are quite durable. They use Kevlar to strengthen the conductor, and it is actually the strongest strand on the poles. They use almost no electronics on the poles, which increases reliability substantially.

Second, the newer 5G high-speed wireless service sounds less expensive than hanging all this fiber, but it comes in two flavors. The long-range one (T-Mobile) eventually requires more cell towers to cover the town, and those towers are also expensive and hard to site (partly due to NIMBY—not in my back yard). In other words, more towers for wireless are not necessarily cheaper than running fiber on poles where there is already established right-of-way on the poles, even all the way to the house premises. The other 5G wireless flavor is many short-range antennas which are themselves mounted on the poles, each antenna is connected to, you guessed it, fiber optic internet on the poles. It’s really a hybrid wireless-plus-fiber system.

At this point I hope you catch my point, which is if my original letter sounded like “wireless good, cheap, fiber optics bad, expensive,” I have learned that is much too simplistic a view.

So, feeling suitably schooled by David on all this, I asked him what he thought about the $50 per month T-Mobile wireless home internet offering I had mentioned. Of course, he admitted he signed up for it immediately, which made me smile. At the moment it is the best deal going. I think we are both interested in how well it holds up next summer, when there are many more people in town sharing the antennas.

Note that I have no financial interest in T-Mobile other than being a customer. I just mention them because they are the first to offer wireless home internet service in our area.

Michael J. Beckerle

Two Ponds Road
Falmouth