Maybe this is too nerdy for this group. I got an OpenWRT ONE router, replaced the old TP-Link one I had. The bad press got to me. The new one is fast, I could not believe how much faster things like downloading files is now.
The worst part was that I had picked out a complicated password with lots of punctuation, and typing that on phones and on-screen keyboards for TVs and game consoles was painful.
Also I pinged Google, and got an IPv6 response for the first time.
Yeah, getting closer with fibre allows better speeds. Copper is susceptible to so many issues like corrosion, interference, water inundation, and signal degradation. Lasers down a fibre are way more stable, have far less drop off, are way more resistant to water ingress, and have the benefit of future proofing. We currently use the best lasers we can but laser technology is really early in it’s development. Lasers from 50 years in the future should be able to use the same fibre without issue and pack many more bits per second with different frequencies of light, overlapping signals, better processing, more coherent light with less deviation, and so on.
I think it is like rail, you spend a fair bit putting in rail and you can run trains on it for 100s of years. Roads are fragile, rails are sturdy and solid, and while trains have changed a lot over the years moving from coal to diesel to electric, but the rail system itself is something you can use with all those trains to move more and more stuff more efficiently over time. Good infrastructure leads to good outcomes.