The complete list
Everything on this site, in one place
Thirteen pieces in four sections: how coverage was claimed and checked, what the four last miles actually are, where congestion really lives, and what happens when a town builds the network itself.
Section 1
A block counted as served
How coverage was claimed, and how it was checked.
- A block counted as served if one house in it could be servedThe old Form 477 census-block rule is the single reason American coverage maps overstated availability for a decade.
- Claimed coverage, against locations a technician could actually connectThe rebuilt fabric maps individual serviceable locations, and the difference between the two counts is the story.
- Who challenges a mapThe challenge process lets a household or a county contest a claim, which is slow and is why the maps kept changing.
Section 2
Four last miles
Cable, fibre, copper and wireless — and what each was for.
- Cable was built to send you television, and it never quite forgaveDOCSIS inherited a spectrum plan designed for downstream broadcast, which is why upstream stayed narrow for so long.
- AT&T stopped selling DSL to new customers in October 2020Copper is being retired unevenly, and what replaces it depends entirely on what the operator already has in the ground.
- What GPON actually splitsOne fibre from the exchange is divided passively between dozens of homes, which is why the shape of the network is a tree.
- Fixed wireless, and the orbitLow-earth-orbit satellite trades latency and capacity for reach, and reach is the problem it was built for.
Section 3
The slow part is often one port
Peering, transit and where congestion lives.
- The slow part is often a single congested portA connection can be perfectly provisioned at the door and still be slow at an interconnect two states away.
- Peering and transit, and who pays whomNetworks either swap traffic for nothing or buy it, and which one applies changes the economics of everything downstream.
- The exchange pointA handful of buildings carry a very large share of national traffic, and their addresses are public.
Section 4
Three towns that stopped waiting
Municipal networks and why they exist.
- Three towns that stopped waitingMunicipal networks exist where a community concluded no commercial operator was coming, and the documented cases are instructive either way.
- What a build actually costs, per passingCost per home passed is the number every municipal case turns on, and it varies by an order of magnitude with density and terrain.
- The co-op modelRural electric cooperatives already own poles and rights of way, which changes the arithmetic completely.