[Discuss] Verizon phasing out copper

[Rich Braun]

The competitive Internet got killed off by the 1996 telecom deregulation act,
along with long-term trends away from anti-trust enforcement which started
with the Reagan era.

In 2000, I was contemplating new services for Shore.Net, inspired by the
already-doomed prospects for DSL (that old Ma Bell copper we're discussing now
was supposedly open for third-party use, but Ma Bell had more of an interest
in obstructing repair work than improving it).  One prospect was medium-range
fixed wireless, which I had installed at home before the cable-modem companies
started to launch their services.  One company set up about 3 antennas around
greater Boston, with a service radius of 10-15 mi from each.  (My Somerville
home was something like 6 miles from their antenna on the 41-story building
next to South Station, from which I got a download-only 2-megabit service.)

But in short order, what I saw was the likes of Cisco buying up and killing
off the medium-range radio companies I talked to at the time.  (Then Shore.Net
itself was bought up...)  Economic trends favored elimination of these rival
products sold to small/medium Internet companies, to create opportunity only
for big equipment companies to sell radios to the big cell-phone companies
which mainly sought short-range mobile radio rather than medium-range fixed.

I can only think of one survivor of this trend, Monkey Brains here in San
Francisco, which sells an affordable ($35/mo or something like that) 8-20 meg
medium-range fixed wireless service.

All this is rapidly starting to feel like ancient-history.  Few will mourn the
passing of copper wire strung on telephone poles.  It's a little like the time
I was hiking the woods  somewhere north of Boston and saw on the ground what
were obviously hardware components from a long-fallen telegraph pole.

-rich