2022-07-04

Wireless broadband will always be fixed more quickly

You will not see it on the official OpenServe outage map, but I have been in a home office without fibre for a day now and all I have is a promise that it will be seen to in "up to 48 working hours" which I assume means 6 working days, so 8 human days. The outage affects several households in my area and all of use are on Telkom's network. All of us are now using mobile data, obviously.

Why is wired broadband usually out for so long? Well, there are the physical reasons: it might not be obvious where the problem is and it might be underground.  In my area the cables are easily accessible and a vandal with kindergarten scissors could do a lot of damage. The problem might also affect only a few users so, frankly, not be very important. None of this is true on a mobile network where it is generally clear that the problem is at the tower and furthermore the problem will affect users over several square kilometres. Not only are there fewer places to go and fix the problem, the wireless broadband provider also has a greater incentive to fix it since it will always affect at least hundreds of users. On the level of longer outages (rather than shorter ones), wireless broadband must therefore generally be more stable than fixed broadband.