Verified answer

how are people saying fiber is more expensive than copper?

fiber is CHEAPER than copper, plain and simple. Copper is a precious metal. Fiber is well.. glass that a pulse of light passes thru.

perhaps the initial cost of infrastructure is what they are trying to claim is more expensive.

copper is susceptible to weather related failures and quality issues, and requires constant maintenance, and field technicians are quite expensive. Fiber OTOH is pretty much set it and forget it, once installed there is not as much of a need for maintenance, as it is less prone to weather related failures, or theft (remember where I said copper is a precious metal, people have often stolen telecom wiring to scrap)

as for quality. many people prefer the quality that you get from circuit switched lines over a copper infrastructure compared to a packet switched line.

price and packages offered? well i would assume that they would offer you a better deal for the fiber line, because they want to move away from the copper infrastructure, not only because of the reduced maintenance costs involved, but also because the fiber infrastructure is not as regulated as the copper network, in which the teleco's must provide access to resellers and CLECs.

can you have both? technically should not be a problem.... however, once the fiber is installed they will try to get all of your lines moved over to fiber... and many times i have seen them actually cut the copper drop out feeding a building EVEN WITH ACTIVE SERVICE STILL!!

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**I am of course referring to FTTH vs POTS over copper, POTS can also be on fiber, such as FTTC or LiteSpan2000, which would not be something that you can choose to have or not, it would just depend on how your area was wired outside.

Metcalfe county Ky the local phone coop SCRTC has ran fiber in the entire county and is in the process of rolling every customer over to it from the old copper lines.

Fibre Optic is far superior to copper lines...More expensive, but can handle much higher speeds, reliability, quality and performance..

Fibre is more reliable but restricted to towns and cities, copper cable is cheaper.