"100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users."
It's plenty for my household with a similar number of users. We have people working from home, streaming, downloading documents or games, etc with no problem.
"The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world"
Because the countries in the rest of the developed world are about the size of 1 state and have higher urbanization. If you want better coverage for an area this size, then it makes sense to include satellite coverage. The gigabit goal excludes them.
"Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost."
They're only the same cost if you're starting from the same location. Copper has better penentration already. Expanding copper might mean adding a couple miles. Expanding to that same location with copper might mean putting in 10-50 miles plus any sort of hub or substation. So yes, equal distance is roughly equal cost, but almost everywhere fiber is put in, it's alongside copper anad thus not increasing coverage nor decreasing costs.
> It's plenty for my household with a similar number of users. We have people working from home, streaming, downloading documents or games, etc with no problem.
I recognize that "no problem" and "as fast as possible" are not the same. 100/20 works for you but once you've seen 1000/20, you really do notice things taking ~10x longer than they need to. It all adds up.
> Copper has better penentration already.
Excluding 56k, twisted-pair copper has absolutely crap throughput unless you're ~500m or less from the 'head-end' which is where your DSL is being turned back into laser pulses. Coax does have better performance/distance compared to twisted pair but now you have a non-trivial network of amps/taps/power-injectors to maintain. DOCSIS really does not like it if there's any issue w/ the coax so you're going to need a small army just to keep the hard-lines in good shape.
I have never seen a PON network get it's throughput cut in half just because somebody didn't screw the cable _all the way_ in to the tap. I see ingress degrading DOCSIS networks all the time though.
At least as far as rural northern CA goes, ATT runs fiber out to plants and then twister pair from there to the customers which are - at most - a few km away. Fiber is already 85% of the way to the customer... let's just finish the job instead of giving everybody a starlink account.
It's plenty for my household with a similar number of users. We have people working from home, streaming, downloading documents or games, etc with no problem.
"The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world"
Because the countries in the rest of the developed world are about the size of 1 state and have higher urbanization. If you want better coverage for an area this size, then it makes sense to include satellite coverage. The gigabit goal excludes them.
"Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost."
They're only the same cost if you're starting from the same location. Copper has better penentration already. Expanding copper might mean adding a couple miles. Expanding to that same location with copper might mean putting in 10-50 miles plus any sort of hub or substation. So yes, equal distance is roughly equal cost, but almost everywhere fiber is put in, it's alongside copper anad thus not increasing coverage nor decreasing costs.