It has declared fiber to the home as its goal and will swallow the initial cost meeting this goal in the name of national interest. The incremental approach A private, profit-driven company cannot always do the right thing, because the payback may be too distant and uncertain. With the so-called hybrid fiber coax, fiber trunk lines are brought to a point near a group of 500 to 2,000 homes and then patched into copper coax that is shared by the entire group. Both the cable companies and the phone companies have come to this same interim solution, more or less unanimously, but from different perspectives. Part of that expense is coping with and switching all that fiber.
Part is the differently skilled labor needed.
Part is the fact that TVs will need an adapter. I bet others would too. Maybe, in staring so hard at the bottom line, we are failing to remember what's really going on here. Catering to the couch Face it, the argument for a fiber-coax installation is an argument for incrementalism. Friends of mine have likened the hybrid solution to cellular telephony.