Or the investment to upgrade doesn’t make financial sense.
> On Jun 20, 2023, at 9:54 AM, Mark Tinka <mark@tinka.africa> wrote: > > > >> On 6/20/23 15:20, Mike Hammett wrote: >> >> Sometimes yes, sometimes no. >> >> When you go down in density, your fixed cost per customer really escalates >> and you simply can't afford to provision as much as you'd like to. When you >> leave glass as a transport mechanism, scaling isn't easy. When you don't >> have a wireline to the customer prem, scaling isn't easy. >> >> You might have a licensed backhaul going 10 - 20 miles to feed a remote >> cluster of customers (be it wireless, copper, coax, or glass as the last >> mile). Those are more or less limited to about 1.5 gb/s. Spectrum >> availability can reduce that. You can sometimes stack them, but again, >> spectrum availability would be king in that decision. >> You might have fixed wireless as the last mile. We're starting to see >> platforms capable of multi-hundred megabit per customer with a sector >> capacity of low gigabits, but again, spectrum availability comes into play >> here. Those solutions require line of sight (or close to it) and only go a >> few miles. The systems that can penetrate foliage really cut your per-sector >> capacity to around 100 megabit, shared amongst all customers. Those are >> simply limitations of physics. >> >> >> When you don't have the benefits of scale, the only viable path forward in a >> managed setting is usage-based billing, with some amount of included data. > > We are saying the same thing re: mobile (when I say mobile I mean wireless) > providers. Because spectrum is a limitation, capped services make sense. > > When I say "fixed line", I mean end-to-end, i.e., from CPE to nearest ISP > PoP, all on wire. In such a case, if an operator is still offering a capped > service, it is because they have no incentive (competition) to do otherwise. > > Mark.
