Fundamentally, the two are very different.

Whilst the information carrier, photons, is identical in both cases, the medium is extremely different.

In the case of fibre we have a highly controlled, flexible medium with extremely good quality of service and very little attenuation. This comes at the price of requiring relatively expensive infrastructure between network nodes.

Wireless technology on the other hand travels through air as a medium. You remove the end-to-end infrastructure requirement, but the trade off is much higher attenuation and lower quality of service. Additionally, you require some amount of 'direct line of sight' depending on frequency. Lower (and hence slower) frequencies are able to refract around mountains and even off the outer atmosphere, providing quite good coverage, but visible light has no such capability. Repeater satellites or LOS base stations would be required to effectively use such a frequency.

This is why HAM radios are great for talking to people kilometres away, but can't be used for effective wireless internet, and why hotspots don't cover more than a few hundred metres at most.

Fiber is just a convenient waveguide for certain electromagnetic frequencies. Bad for others.

That said, your understanding is a bit "off."

Amateur Radio (HAM) has microwave frequencies available for use that would be VERY effective for point-to-point wireless internet. We even have frequencies that are very close to the existing bands and there would be no problem running LTE over those frequencies. The problems with amateur radio are regulatory, not technical.

Generally speaking, the higher the frequency, the higher the attenuation. Of course, the higher frequencies are better suited for the kinds of modulation rates necessary for high bitrate communications. So there's that.

But all of this is besides the point. No technology exists in a vacuum and must compete against others for particular applications and for particular cost models. That's why telecommunications engineers have no hair and bad tempers. This stuff is hard.

For "lower" bitrate communications, wireless is the hands-down winner. The cost to deploy a network for a given level of service to a range of end-stations is just so much easier and cheaper that lots of other nations skipped over building a wireline network and just went straight to wireless. Mobility of the stations is almost a secondary concern.

Once you get to the point where your communications are less intermittent and higher bitrate, it's really a question of how far you need to go and how much/how often you need to communicate.

Lots of LTE stations are connected to a central office (router) via fiber (gigabit ethernet mostly). Lots more are connected via point to point microwave. Backhaul of bandwidth is something you dont hear talked about a lot but it's a big part of why it can be hard to get LTE/4G/WiMax into a particular location. Economics are a big part of that equation.

SO, I wish the Google Fiber guys well and I hope they succeed, but the telecommunications market is so broad and complicated that it would be foolish to look at one company's efforts to shake up a single market and equate that with a sea-change in how the broadband market works.

edit: I met Milo Medin (who is now running Google Fiber) and he offered me a chance to work at @Home way back when. In retrospect, I probably should have pursued it.

Thanks for the in-depth reply. The example of HAM radio was a poor one, I was associating it with Low Frequency [1] radio when it in fact covers a much larger spectrum.

I agree that telecommunications is a hard subject, and even more so that different technologies are useful for different purposes. That is why I think the original comment was off:

> If you could rig up visible-light laser communications, you wouldn't need the fiber. Fiber's just a convenient container.

Something we haven't really talked about, and I'm not sure how relevant it is, is the saturation of the wireless spectrum. Point to Point wireless is obviously a different beast, but for broadcast wireless is there a saturation point where we can't safely send more data over the airwaves?

I like that fibre is by construction point to point, not restricted by line of sight, capable of very high bit-rates with relatively low energy (correct me here if this is wrong), and excellent quality of service.

Wireless has a lot less infrastructure, particularly when used for the last mile, and is definitely extremely convenient in many situations. I don't think it is the solution for general purpose network infrastructure, though that may change in the future (and is clearly the choice for some countries already).

I wonder what the replacement for fibre will be in 20-30 years time - is wireless the only frontier at the moment?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_frequency#Propagation_of_L...

Well, at microwave frequencies (think anything at 10Ghz and up, really) you're already talking about directional antennas. The RF engineers will call anything above 1Ghz microwave, but that's really splitting hairs.

Fiber is a waveguide and not much different in that respect from coaxial cable (or for that matter twister pair). What matters is what kinds of frequencies the waveguide will accomodate and what kind of attenuation those frequencies will experience. This matters for lots of important reasons.

As an example, take RG-6 coaxial cable (the kind you probably have in your home):

At 100Mhz (VHF) the attenuation is about 2.0 dB/100ft.

At 700Mhz (UHF) the attenuation is about 6.0 dB/100ft.

Now, take a look at Corning SMF-28 singlemode fiber:

At 1310nm (229.644 THz) the attenuation is 0.35dB/kilometer.

At 1550nm (192.4 THz) the attenuation is 0.22dB/kilometer.

So, fiber is an exceptional waveguide at very high frequencies, which makes it uniquely suitable for high-bandwidth communications. Compared to all of the other waveguides, it's the most durable, most compact, and most future-proof solution.

Except when you can't use it.

SO, what's left? Wireless probably. Well, there is free-space optical which uses the same 1550nm frequency but has the problem of aligning the transmitter and receiver to have a completely free line-of-sight. Then there is the fact that attenuation through free space isn't the same as within a fiber. Attenuation at 1550nm ranges from 0.2dB/km (clear) to 100dB/KM (foggy). So, the atmosphere is a shitty waveguide for optical frequencies.

But there is still a chance with wireless, since we aren't restricted to the propagation characteristics of optical frequencies or the directionality. With advanced modulation techniques (CDMA/OFDM), it's actually pretty easy to fit many more bits/hertz than you could with fiber transmission systems. It's just that that sort of heroics is not needed for fiber systems since it's easy to get extra bandwidth with another fiber.

Now, when you are talking about "last-mile" types of solutions, it really depends on what the alternatives are and what the "load-factor" is for that method. There is a big difference between phone calls and streaming audio for example when it comes to wireless systems. All of those things need to be taken into account.

IMHO, the end-game is probably going to be coax to a smaller set of homes using whatever flavor of DOCSIS is available at that moment. Most CableCo networks are mostly fiber anyhow. Once you get to a certain "cluster size" the choice of fiber to the home versus fiber to the local node and then coax to the house becomes an engineering question. For lower bandwidth or other services, you'll see wireless broadband displace some take-up of coax-base services. The only reason I think this will happen is because the coax is already deployed (and so it will be used). If we didn't have almost universal penetration of coax into the average home, there would be no question that most broadband would be wireless to the home.

The FTTH systems now being deployed have lots more in common with cable systems than is commonly understood. Your fiber doesn't actually go ALL the way to the central office. Your fiber is split at some point in the neighborhood (from 4-64 homes) and then is carried to the central office.