There's a number of reasons that I went with fiber. One is that at high frequencies (like 1900Mhz), the coax attenuation gets out of hand. I'm actually using some short segments of LMR-400 coax (good stuff) up there, but if I'd run them all the way to my house (around 150'), I'd be looking at about 9db of loss. That'd hurt me pretty bad since an unaided cell phone on the ground gets an average RSSI of -117 dbm (for average joes, that's about -5 [yes, negative five] bars). Another reason is that the tower makes a really nice lightening rod. Fiber lessens the possibility that the rest my network will be burnt to a crisp in the event of a lightening strike. I have 120V AC running up that tower to power the devices...but it goes directly to a box on the utility pole - does not pass go and does not collect $200, so hopefully it'll leave my house alone. I've got grounding rods around that tower everywhere too. I also wanted to leave the mini-WISP possibility open long term, so I could end up with more bandwidth and more devices at the top eventually. I actually ran 12 strands of OM3 fiber up there...perhaps a little overkill...but I also ran a leg to my detached garage where I keep my 4 post server rack, and that's another story.....all of this to avoid satellite's higher latencies and lower bandwidth caps or paying Charter $20,000 to run cable out to me.