190K Cable, Phone Customers Without Service in Wake of Harvey → Copper network

AT&T's copper last mile was likely killed in this storm, esp. if the air dryers in the CO gave out.

The good news would be a lot more gigapower being rolled out to replace the failed copper. Bad news is it took a disaster to push AT&T to that point more broadly.

Comcast will likely opt for a fast recovery and repair HFC where possible.

Houston actually has a surprising amount of Gigapower areas already. They have been deploying it rapidly here, but this may speed it up even more.

The concern is they will try to do what they did with Katrina try to replace everything with wireless options instead of rebuilding.

Verizon tried that in areas of NYC after Sandy, Until they got threatened with bad PR and court then they rebuilt with FIOS.

..... you mean "FIXED WIRELESS" ...... you'll be the first guinea pigs .... er ..... testers ......

Are you 100% sure? Even the lowly Verizon gave in and rolled out FiOS in the aftermath of Sandy. People marched on the local and state governments and they bent Verizon to do the right thing.

4th largest city in the USA isn't exactly a great place to run a guinea pig trial of alpha stage 5G fixed wireless.