Any idea what the
Islands Broadband Concern Group in Zuckerberg's garden are plotting these days?
In Lantau Top Express (HGC/Hutch) are lighting up gigabit fibre while PCCW-gator is offering 30Mbps copper upgrades for additional HK$38 / 2 years min for their DSL captives.
Here we have an unconfirmed suggested
YLF-band pricing for PCCW's upgraded VDSL service, but with suggested data speeds far beyond what even the latest revisions of
VSDL2 achieve. 300M and 1000M?
[NB: turns out this floated proposal doesn't actually exist; it was a good joke by some anonymous local guys with a sense of humour!]Not to mention that any microwave backbone links across the channel would be totally inadequate to deal with serious "last-mile" bandwidth upgrades.
Several years ago Top Express (HGC/Hutch) were given permission to dig up our precious streets to lay their fibre cables around the villages.
Under what provisions were they given the permission to do it, if it wasn't to provide improved broadband service on Lamma?
Then there's the interconnecting fibre across the channel issue, which still seems totally impossible to solve.
Why? The existing "private" cable is being operated by Hutchison (our friendly HK Electric plant) and should already have more than enough capacity to spare for residential use. However if another additional cable is considered necessary, what or who prevents it being laid alongside the existing one so that the other branch of Hutchison (HGC / Top Express) can light up their last mile fibre here too, like on Lantau?
It would be nice to learn what exactly is stopping alternatives from being rolled out before some feel they have no choice but to sign up for the higher-priced but still microwave-bottlenecked PCCW proposal with minimum 4-year commitment.