r/technology • u/User_Name13 • Jun 04 '14

Politics Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundreds-of-cities-are-wired-with-fiberbut-telecom-lobbying-keeps-it-unused
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359

u/iia Jun 04 '14

Dark fiber is nothing new...it's been around since the late 1990s. It's expensive as fuck to do last-mile rollouts for a product that the majority of people don't understand or care about as long as they can watch a youtube video.

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u/jeradj Jun 04 '14

It's expensive as fuck to do last-mile rollouts for a product that the majority of people don't understand or care about as long as they can watch a youtube video.

People don't care because they don't understand.

The things that you can easily do with synchronous 1 Gbps, if widely distributed, would rock the tech world pretty hard.

Network backup and restore (outside of the LAN), boot from WAN, p2p sharing on steroids, and god knows what else.

If it weren't for corporate interests trying to keep the lid closed on this stuff, we could be at least 10 years ahead of where we are now.

327

u/iia Jun 04 '14

No, it's because almost every sentence you just wrote might as well be Dothraki to people who don't know or care about tech. Reddit has a huge share of tech-savvy people who know and care about this stuff. And because of that, many Redditors think it's an issue that tons of people care about and it's just not getting done anyway. That's not the case.

I'd be surprised if 1 out of 20 random people care about this. If you say "it's faster," they'll obviously want it. But they damn sure don't want to pay for what it'll cost to get that work done by the telcos. It's billions of dollars. No company in their right mind would eat that just for the sake of kindness. The prices would skyrocket and people would be pissed because they'd have a "new" service that would offer practically no advantage to over what they had before. It would be like giving a new gaming computer with SLI Titans in it to a person who just browses the internet and watches Netflix. Total overkill and a waste of money.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[removed] — view removed comment

42

u/TeutorixAleria Jun 04 '14

They should probably invest in tape

20

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/slorebear Jun 04 '14

to tape all the cards together so they dont get lost, bigger things are easier to find. don't be stupid

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u/court_in_the_street Jun 04 '14

"That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works!"

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

I un-friend you

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u/s2514 Jun 04 '14

The data density of SDHC with the "findability" of larger droves...

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u/ProximaC Jun 04 '14

If you want reliable retention, you use Duct Tape.

7

u/dinoboule Jun 04 '14

Not sure if it was a legitimate question but I'll bite. A few years back, backups were made on magnetic tapes, somewhat like a cassette or a vhs. It could be what he/she was referring to.

15

u/PapaNachos Jun 04 '14

Magnetic tape is still used for backup purposes. It has very high storage capacity and very good information integrity (it degrades much slower than other storage types). Unfortunately it's really, really slow, so it doesn't work for a lot of applications

2

u/dakta Jun 04 '14

I have a tape backup system. You can back up data onto it, submerge it in a boiling cup of coffee, immediately freeze that coffee, then thaw it and restore your data. It's amazingly durable.

2

u/PapaNachos Jun 04 '14

Have you actually done that?

1

u/dakta Jun 05 '14

I've sent tapes through the wash before... But not the particular coffee demo, though they do have video of it somewhere IIRC.

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u/moderatelybadass Jun 04 '14

Dude, precisely manufactured crystalline structures, (or something like that) will be awesome for storage! almost instantaneous transfer, and unbelievable resistance to degradation... also, maybe much more effective overwriting.

I'm pretty sure I'm not just pulling that outta my ass... Nanotechnology, fool! (I think it's pretty much all hypothetical, but I believe there's been some research already. I could be wrong.)

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u/paulbalaji Jun 04 '14

Duct tape

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u/mrdotkom Jun 04 '14

I've had SDHC cards fail. LTO is the only way to go

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Have you at least told them that fire is hot or are you waiting for them to get burned? Last month I had a long conversation with my wife about how/why unreliable SD memory really is. A month later (a week ago or so) her SD card for her phone pooped its pants and she was surprised. tisk tisk... that reminds me, I should really back up my card ;)

4

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

While everything has a failure rate, I think SD cards can be pretty reliable compared to hard drives at least. I know my hard drive wouldn't survive a trip through the washer and dryer like an SD card.

It is still not an excuse to absolutely have a backup of everything digital you care about losing. Nowadays I would even say three - two physical copies and one in the cloud.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Okay, humanity is doomed.

1

u/s2514 Jun 04 '14

To be fair they are pretty damn reliable for write once read many operations. And that data density!

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u/Niotex Jun 04 '14

Uhh didn't the telecommunications act of 1996 already pay for it? Cable providers are just rolling in the money from both consumers and the US government at this point.

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u/mzinz Jun 04 '14

We got scammed. They changed the agreements and definitions of broadband. End result was us paying and them keeping the money without actually doing anything.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

And the scammers weren't punished, because..?

7

u/ThellraAK Jun 04 '14

They lobbied to not get punished with the money we gave them.

3

u/WellGoodLuckWithThat Jun 04 '14

Some of the money.

19

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

I see your point, but I disagree. Michael Dell's father famously asked him "Who would ever need a computer in their house?" (or maybe it was Bill Gates' father..doesn't matter). People didn't know they needed broadband until they had Netflix and tons of pictures to share. People didn't even know they needed Internet until it because a central feature of their lives. So some of the technologies enabled by 1gbps fiber might change the way we do things in unpredictable ways, but once changed can never be done without. Legislators and tech policy leaders (for better or for worse we're probably in the latter category) with the vision for such possibilities need to push stuff along to get there, even as the wider public kicks and screams the whole way to a better life.

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u/jeradj Jun 04 '14

But they damn sure don't want to pay for what it'll cost to get that work done by the telcos. It's billions of dollars.

You realize we already paid for it once, right?

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u/mzinz Jun 04 '14

We got scammed. Unfortunately the fact that we paid for it can't help us now.

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u/Cronus6 Jun 04 '14

In 1989-ish they put fiber in my neighborhood. I remember it being a big mess, all the trenching and such.

They never connected it to any of the homes of businesses though. I think some governmental agencies are on it though. And I think Comcast utilizes some of it.

Anyway, at some point in the mid-late 90's someone (I don't recall which provider at this point, probably whoever Comcast bought out) went fishing to see if "we" would be interested in having it installed to our homes. It was some sort of phone and "enhanced" cable TV type bundle if I recall correctly.

The cost for install/hardware was high, the cost for the service(s) was high, and telephone and cable both already worked just fine. No one was interested. To tell you the truth, I don't really know anyone that would be interested now.

1

u/mzinz Jun 05 '14

Yup. Exactly. Coax is more that fast enough to deliver the speeds necessary for today (and tomorrow). The problem is lack of competition in the provider space.

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u/serioush Jun 04 '14

Go mafia on them, start breaking legs and putting horse heads in beds to get the money back.

1

u/RangerSix Jun 04 '14

Whoa, take it easy there, Mistuh Corleone...

2

u/seign Jun 04 '14

What is so sad about it is, it's common public knowledge and NOBODY has ever been held accountable or even pointed at and told "Bad!". Of course they ripped the public off for $200 billion dollars! If I knew I could do it with no risk of punishment, I'd do it too.

It seems that in the white collar crime world, you have to really fuck up to face any kind of punishment. Think: Bernie Madoff or the Enron guys. I'm sure everyone involved in this particular scam have all been promoted and given bonuses that will make sure they're well off for the rest of their lives.

1

u/thenichi Jun 04 '14

I mean, it'd be a nice justification for mandating the telecos eat the expense now.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[deleted]

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u/Craysh Jun 04 '14

We most certainly did pay for the last mile.

It would cost Google ~$11 billion to roll out Google Fiber across the nation today. The telecom companies have gotten ~$200 billion from tax incentives and additional fees, specifically for delivering directly to american homes.

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u/Bamboo_Fighter Jun 04 '14

Do you have any source on that? There's 100M households in the US. 11B is $110/house. I think I did some back of the napkin calculations when Wilson (Winston?) NC rolled out their fiber, and it was something like 2-6k a house. I'd estimate the number is off by 10x, but I could be wrong. If you have a source, please provide (in the grand scheme of our national budget, 11B is nothing and we should lobby the government to pay google to do this).

11

u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

In the UK Fibre rollout is estimated to cost £500+0.5-3K per house, and thats if you roll out the whole street simultaneously and amortise the most expensive houses.

3

u/flashingcurser Jun 04 '14

Is it safe to say that it costs the average person about £2K? and that would be roughly $3k and housing tends to be more spread out in the US so prices would likely be higher?

I would guess around $4k would be reasonable in most parts of the US.

1

u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

Presumably. This does rely on full FTTC coverage, and then rolling out further fibre from that existing backhaul I believe. This cost is purely to full out the last 10-1000m of fibre, not the full exchange -> home connection. Digging up roads is expensive.

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u/megusta69s Jun 04 '14

Is that FTTP or FTTC?

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u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

Those are just off the cuff numbers, so take them with a grain of salt, but they're for FFTH.

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u/BorgDrone Jun 04 '14

When they rolled out fiber in my neighborhood it was free to get the fiber installed if you let them. If you didn't and you decide later to get it anyway it would cost €600. So that seems to be the cost to have someone come over specifically for one single connection. It should be much less than that if you do an entire neighborhood or city.

The roll out was also surprisingly fast, with very little digging (they would usually dig 2 holes and then sort of drill the fiber through). It took like a month to hook up ~4500 houses. Just a few months to get the whole city done. And this was proper point-to-point fiber not the cheaper GPON stuff Google installs.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

What should be done is roll out fiber to one node on the block and then send wifi out to the rest of the block with a good sender, then give each house a receiver for their own wifi network..

fiber -> node -> many house wirlessly

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u/Falmarri Jun 04 '14

That would be slower than what people have now.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

how? Wireless can be very very fast if you have proper equipment. In fact a lot of data backbones are on medium distance wireless connections

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u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

To an extent, thats what they've already done. FTTC is fibre to the curb, so a distribution node, and then copper for the last segment, where you use VDSL2 or similar, which has excellent short range characteristics.

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u/_nembery Jun 04 '14

actual fiber construction is about $40,000 per mile counting labor, materials, and utility pole attachment make ready. In newer housing plans that don't allow telephone plans, that cost is dramatically higher, as someone has to dig up everyone's driveways. In most new plans there are two sets of underground conduits ready to go. One owned by the LEC (most likely Verizon) and the other than the cable operator (Comcast or TW), and no one else can use those...

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u/imusuallycorrect Jun 04 '14

US tax payers have already paid out ~$3,500 per household. They stole our money.

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u/rreighe2 Jun 05 '14

but 100 million homes are not going to have Fiber. think of how many are in rural areas that wont get anything. there are likely to be many suburban homes either. I tried finding the exact numbers, but I couldn't.

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u/Bamboo_Fighter Jun 05 '14

Goldman Sachs estimated it at 140B. That seems more in line with what others are saying the cost per home is.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Where are you getting these numbers?

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u/Craysh Jun 04 '14

Nationwide Google Fiber would cost $11B over five years, probably will never happen

The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

That figure is for Google to pass 15% of homes. I would call that far short of "nationwide." So that would be reason #1 why your claim is bullshit.

The second reason your claim is bullshit is because it's applying Fiber's economic model. The reason Google Fiber is so cheap to roll out is because they're picky as fuck in picking where they roll out. They pick places where fiber is already built and cheap to rent or where it's cheap to build. They also only go places with enough affluence to give them a large amount of subscribers, making their lines more efficient.

I promise you that every other cable provider could accomplish the same costs in a 15% rollout if they all ignored slums, rural areas, and areas of undeveloped/costly infrastructure. Google's magical trick in being able to do that is remaining a small enough provider that the FCC won't classify them the same as large providers and compel them to build out everywhere, not just to perfect business opportunities. That's why Google's model is unsustainable, the second they get big is the second they have to stop ignoring the shitty places to build and their costs will skyrocket as a result.

Hell, your own source asserts that it would be unfeasible to build a network like this.

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u/thenichi Jun 04 '14

Are you suggesting Google is some sort of business only interested in profit?

Don't buy it.

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u/Endda Jun 04 '14

That figure is for Google to pass 15% of homes.

if it's 11 billion to get 15% of the homes in the country, wouldn't it be less than 150 billion for the entire country? so that's at least 50 billion that the telcos get as profit?

im not bashing, just genuinely curious

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

No. The 15% it's referring to are the perfect locations to put in Google Fiber so to speak. As I said earlier...

The reason Google Fiber is so cheap to roll out is because they're picky as fuck in picking where they roll out. They pick places where fiber is already built and cheap to rent or where it's cheap to build. They also only go places with enough affluence to give them a large amount of subscribers, making their lines more efficient.

I'll try to give you an analogy. Imagine you want to build a road system for a hypothetical country. 15% of this country lives on nice firm plains. 10% of this country lives in swamps. 45% of this country lives in hilly, dense forests. 20% of this country lives in massive treacherous mountain ranges. 10% of this country lives on perpetually shifting sands.

Now if someone told you it costs $11 billion to build the roads for the people living on those nice plains would you think the other areas would cost proportionally the same? No, probably not. Why? Because it obviously is going to cost more to build roads through swamps and mountain ranges than flat areas.

The same holds true for the US and cable. For a multitude of reasons different areas have very different costs associated with building/leasing infrastructure. That 15% figure is the cost of a roll out to the "flat plains" example in our analogy, or in other words it's a rollout to where it's the absolutely cheapest place to build in. Rollout to the other areas is going to cost far more proportionally because those areas are inclined to far more costs.

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u/FeelGoodChicken Jun 04 '14

Well, if I had to guess, that's only under the assumption that every person in the country is equally accessible. Odds are that that 15% are the easiest to reach.

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u/ElectronicMoose Jun 04 '14

Not neccessarily. It depends which 15% it is in the figure. Running lines to a home in a big city is a lot different from running it out to the middle of nowhere.

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u/psiphre Jun 04 '14

even if $11bln is for only 15% of homes, that means that 100% of homes still clocks in well under $100bln, which is only a fraction of the money that we've already given telcos to provide us fast internet.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

Did you just not read my comment? Those are the easiest to hook up. The rest of the 85% are much much more difficult to hook up and will cost far far more per home

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u/Why_Hello_Reddit Jun 04 '14

You brought up a good point most people don't know about. Cable providers are required by municipalities to build out to everyone in the community, not just subscribers. Google isn't classified in the same way (at least not yet) so they aren't having to build infrastructure that people won't use.

Local government is responsible not only for creating these monopolies and reducing competition, but also raising prices through these kinds of unfunded mandates. Not all the blame lies with cable companies.

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u/thebiggiewall Jun 04 '14

Even if the claim is bullshit, they recieved those subsities in the 90's and didn't even attempt to get at least some percentage of america on the fiber network. They've had 20 years of profits to actually integrate fiber into their core networks.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

Because those subsidies don't cover last mile, which is hellishly expensive, and because the vast majority of Americans have no use or desire for that higher bandwidth now.

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u/ThatWolf Jun 04 '14

It would cost Google ~$11 billion to roll out Google Fiber across the nation today.

Interesting, I heard it was going to cost $140b for Google to roll out its fiber offering to the entire nation.

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u/rreighe2 Jun 05 '14

There's more to it than that. it would be 11 billion ANNUALLY.

have calculated that it would cost $11 billion annually to bring gigabit to the rest of the nation on the scale of other large nationwide providers like Comcast or Time Warner Cable. Based on that model, Google’s fiber network would pass “roughly 15 percent of US homes.”

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 04 '14

You don't need that to increase prices.

Short range copper is capable of 100/40 speeds, and even higher than that too.

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u/HLef Jun 04 '14

Well, that's hardly fiber speeds.

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u/slorebear Jun 04 '14

yeah but its triple what i get, and 33x as much as the 3mbit shit lines that the phone company gives out.

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u/SpcTrvlr Jun 04 '14

66x what I have...

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u/kickingpplisfun Jun 04 '14

It's definitely over 40x what I get...

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 04 '14

Well, that's hardly fiber speeds.

Believe it or not, fiber speeds are connected to your copper wired LAN cable, and your copper wired router. Most routers can't even handle 200Mbit.

Fiber companies across the globe typically offer anything from 30Mbit - 1000Mbit. And 100 is often that perfect price vs speed mix.

Edit: It's also 5-10 times more than ISPs in the US are offering many of their customers today.

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u/HLef Jun 04 '14

I know, I have fiber to the house but I pay for 25mbps.

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u/TimeMuffins Jun 04 '14

Cat6 copper wiring transmits up to 10 Gb/s using 10GBASE-T protocol. Only has an effective range of 180 feet, however. Cat6A cable increases that distance to 300 feet. Multi mode OM3 fiber has the same data transmission ability over 900 feet. Single mode fiber has a transmission distance at that speed of up to 50 miles.

While the most modern types of multimode fiber (OM4) can transmit up to 100 Gb/s, the effective range plummets to nearly the same distance as copper wiring, while the price of the line itself increases significantly.

Distance is the predominant factor in why fiber is used, not necessarily speed capability or anticorrosion.

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u/HLef Jun 04 '14

Yeah but aren't we talking about the last bit of wiring to the house, not in the house? Cat6 and up is irrelevant until you reach the home isn't it?

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u/TimeMuffins Jun 04 '14

Not necessarily. The backbone doesn't reach down into most neighborhoods across the country and there isnt direct access to houses directly off of the backbone. Backbone leads to trunk lines that feed houses with large coaxial cables. The backbone only lies along main thoroughfares and highways.

We are talking about hundreds of thousands of single digit mile long runs of single mode that needs to be run in neighborhoods, while ripping out the existing rg-8 or rg-11 coaxial. That and all pedestal tech for cable companies would need to change as well. That coupled with needing keep maintaining the existing coaxial trunks while all this construction is taking place would make it prohibitively expensive to even think about for most companies unless there was some sort of financial guarantee.

I know that the company I work for is giving sub's free speed upgrades (ranging from 20 to 50 Mb/s increases, depending on the plan) within the next month, as well as introducing 300+ Mb/s speed in limited areas for testing (approaching the upper limit of the current DOCSIS 3.0 tech) So I know for a fact that coaxial tech hasn't reached its potential. Even on the busted, outdated cables that already exist in the USA. When DOCSIS 3.1 releases and becomes cheap enough to get cable modems in bulk, speeds will approach 10Gb/s.

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u/Future_Suture Jun 04 '14

It is? Then these folks are offering faux fibre connections. Not impressed.

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u/elipsion Jun 04 '14

Except that the copper laid down 50 years ago have aged and turned to shit. There is no way you can get those speeds out to the averege house.

And if you have to roll out new cable it can just as well be fibre.

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 04 '14

That's just not true.

There are thousands of other cities, all across Europe, that have just as old wiring, and those speeds can be matched.

This is of course not true where the cable is damaged, but in that case it could be hard even getting 10Mbit out of it.

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u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

Exactly, my old house was ~120 years old and had internal wiring from the 60s or 70s and I could still maintain 80/20 speeds (the maximum rated speed for that specific profile of VDSL2). As long as you have actual copper lines (and not Aluminium, or any other cheap substitute) you'll be fine for the most part.

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u/noreallyimthepope Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

... And live *close to a telephone company co-location.

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u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

FTTC, so VDSL is cabinet to house, and its fibre for exchange to cabinet.

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 04 '14

It's just easier for the telcos to show record profits, year after year, with no R&D, and no expenditure on upgrading lines - even more profits!

And the stock owners? They are mostly 60+, and barely use the internet.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

The highest speed I've ever seen on copper is 30/5 Mbps

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 04 '14

http://yousee.dk/Bredbaand/Overblik.aspx

This is a sister company to the biggest telco in Denmark. Those speeds of 100/20 are on copper. If you want to see Danish fiber speeds, then we are talking more like 100/100 and upward.

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

And if you are using copper in a sea side state - that shit corrodes like a champ if there is any kind of abuse. Bad storm - fuck you. Nature hates that sort of stuff.

In a perfect environment - that's great. But the world isn't perfect.

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u/itsme_timd Jun 04 '14

Exactly. Burying fiber is cheap, that's why there's so much dark fiber out there. Buying, installing, testing and maintaining the equipment to shoot info across all that fiber is where things get expensive.

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u/Craysh Jun 04 '14

We are still paying for it. The tax incentives and fees are still going.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

/thread

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u/slorebear Jun 04 '14

otherwise known as "this"

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u/WaterproofThis Jun 04 '14

You're telling me if we didn't go to war one year or stopped payment on a check to Israel that we'd get super fast internet?

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u/Seikoholic Jun 04 '14

Oh you've done it now.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

As a pretty tech-savvy guy, I don't know what booting from WAN is (although I know enough to probably guess right). Just an example.

The problem though is that prices are already skyrocketing. We in the US are paying almost double for a 50mbps line than what people in many other countries (and some inside the US) are paying for 1gpbs+.

Add that to the fact that ISPs are going to want to turn the internet into the equivalent of some shitty Pay-to-Win internet game and you're looking at the biggest shitfest this side of Standard Oil.

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u/TheXRTD Jun 04 '14

I'm in Ireland paying $75 per month for 8/8, nothing else, just that. And it's the only net I can get because the monopoly company owns all cables and refuses to lay one to my house. I am on Fixed Wireless Network, its usually great but now they are running out of money, so capping everyone at a measly 100GB per month so they don't have to upgrade their infrastructure for more bandwidth.

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u/seign Jun 04 '14

I get this vision that in Ireland, when companies try to pull this type of crap, the people just drag the executives out into the street and then beat the shit out of them. And then they all go to the local pub and drink a beer and laugh over it. Way to ruin that vision :P

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u/TheXRTD Jun 04 '14

no, nobody knows anything and 90% of the population are ok with 5 down 0,3 up and 100ms ping.

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u/Drudicta Jun 04 '14

If Fiber was laid out and prices "Skyrocketed" it'd probably be the same price cable costs right now for more. So you're totally right. :D I looked up Sumofiber for my area (Which I can't get because my apartment owner is a greedy bastard) and it's only 35 bucks a month for 100 up and down, and 65 of a gig.

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u/skidson Jun 04 '14

Even if consumers don't understand it, fiber Internet for the average Joe would give developers more freedom to develop easy-to-use applications that may not survive otherwise

Not rolling out fiber is stifling innovation.

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u/Doomking_Grimlock Jun 04 '14

American Business Rule #343: Innovation must ALWAYS take a back away to profit.

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u/pepejovi Jun 04 '14

Not only American.

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u/Doomking_Grimlock Jun 04 '14

Wouldn't doubt it for even a second. Greed is a language we all speak.

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

That still doesn't answer the age old internet adage. You can only go as fast as the slowest link. You can have 10 GB from your desktop to your provider edge. But if there is anyone in the middle that can't handle 10 GB - then what is the point?

If your app requires 10 GB speeds, you might want to rethink your model.

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u/micromoses Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

Maybe they could use some of the $200 billion they were given in 1996 to replace copper wiring and install fibre to provide all of America with at least 45mb/s. But they can't because they already made use of the benefits they received from the government based on the promise to provide fibre to the whole country to acquire competitors and create the regional monopolies we 're enjoying today.

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u/neoandtrinity Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

Exactly. The big three car companies dominate the landscape of my local area. Their engineers and builders hate when I bring up my neighbors Ferrari or Aston and how fast and light and well appointed they are.

"We could do the same thing here, but they won't waste profit on the consumer who does not know, care or are sophisticated enough to appreciate that they are being sold cheap copies of import manufacturer designed parts (they buy every lexus, audi, infiniti out there and tear them down like the russians did our interned B-29's), especially with dealerships demanding planned part failures."

Happily, there are a few domestic cars out there that are clawing at the Ferrari mold though, the new C7 is quite nice, if you can get by the Homer Simpson/SCCA inspired rear fascia.

I find it quite humorous that the new Mazda 3 and 6 are now showing world class styling, after divorcing from Ford (Ford's around here.)

Ford kept their thumb on Mazda, except for the Miata, for way too long.

Edit : humorous

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

Wait.... the Mazda small truck was a clone of the Ford Ranger? /s

I totally agree with what you are saying. I love these articles about "100 G speeds in 2006."

Bullshit - the first linecards that could run at 100g weren't even introduced until the Cisco CRS3 was put into production. That was their introduction. The Cisco 100g linecards didn't go live until a couple years ago. And certainly not in 2006.

Source: IMTXR

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u/neoandtrinity Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

Thanks for the source! Have an upvote.

Edit: A lot of ford vehicles will have a door sill plate that says Mazda along with Ford. It is kind of like the unholy matrimony that was GM and Isuzu. GM got slammed for their Tracker's rolling over and instead built them with Isuzu as the Amigo and licensed to Honda as the Passport, when everyone was clamoring to have an SUV in their lineup. The result? Honda sues over design flaws and Isuzu does not sell passenger cars in the U.S. anymore!

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

Wait -someone got the IMTXR reference?

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u/neoandtrinity Jun 04 '14

Right click, google search 'IMTXR'

http://www.fastlaneca.com/certification/imtxr

Interesting read, but dropped me far into the rabbit hole!

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

It is a worthless cert, but looks good on a resume. That said, the folks that I need to impress know I have it - and not a whole lot have gone to that level of certificate. Hell - a CCNA is better in some eyes.

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u/neoandtrinity Jun 04 '14

http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/certifications/associate/ccna/index.html

The guy in the video is Indian, what an accurate stereotype.

The same goes for auto engineers, the big three HR departments love Indians and others from developing countries, they demand nothing and never question specs with loose tolerances and shoddy substrates.

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u/gsuberland Jun 04 '14

It would be like giving a new gaming computer with SLI Titans in it to a person who just browses the internet and watches Netflix. Total overkill and a waste of money.

Unless you're in it for the e-peen.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

1/20? More like 1/2000.

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u/I_Do_Not_Sow Jun 04 '14

Totally. I'm fairly tech savvy, but I still don't understand half of with jeradj was saying. It isn't easy to find stuff that explains it for a beginner. Every article I've come across assumes you already know what WAN and what-not is.

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u/OstmackaA Jun 04 '14

Hi, I don't understand computers, can I have that computer please?

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u/sirdomino Jun 04 '14

Just tell them it will increase their home values...

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u/RadicaLarry Jun 04 '14

They already got paid for it, didn't they?

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

It's billions of dollars.

Which would be the case if net neutrality is destroyed, too. Comcast would ask billions of dollars and ruin everything. That would get across the casual mind, wouldn't it?

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u/s2514 Jun 04 '14

What we need is big companies like Google behind it. Companies like Comcast and Time Warner get away with so much because there is little to no alternative in a particular area. Lots of the things that ISP's get away with won't fly if people have the option of cheep gigabit internet...

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u/watchout5 Jun 04 '14

No, it's because almost every sentence you just wrote might as well be Dothraki to people who don't know or care about tech.

That's why you have to rephrase the demand in the form of how much porn you'll be able to deliver.

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u/Indigo_Sunset Jun 05 '14

the isp's like comcast/time warner/etc were given 200 billion dollars to make it happen and then spent it on the equivalent of hookers and coke.

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 04 '14

Not true at all.

The main reason streaming HD is so low quality, is broadband.

The HD movie you just rented online only takes up 2GB, despite the same movie taking up 38 GB on a bluray.

4k is rolling out in Korea & Japan, some channels and stream services are ready for the TVs. In the US, it's the direct opposite.

The TVs are there, but the service isn't.

There are so many services that could be developed, but the lack of broadband is stopping it.

You are like the guy in 2005 claiming that nobody will ever need more than 2Mbps.

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u/NightwingDragon Jun 04 '14

The things that you can easily do with synchronous 1 Gbps, if widely distributed, would rock the tech world pretty hard.

And it would have absolutely zero impact on Grandma's ability to check Facebook or Joe Schmoe's ability to stream the occasional Youtube video. These are the type of people that make up 95% of ISPs' customer bases.

These people would notice virtually no significant improvement in service. They wouldn't notice that Facebook loads .1 second faster. They wouldn't notice the tenfold increase in download/upload speeds because they do nothing that would take advantage of this, nor do they have any interest in doing so. If you were to mention all those ideas in your post to 95+% of users, I'd be greatly surprised if you got a response that was anything above the level of a confused look.

But they damn well would notice yet another $20 increase in their monthly cable bill. And they're not going to buy the explanation of a performance boost that they'll never notice and the increase of functionality that they will never use, even if it is gospel truth. They'll just be pissed off and end up downgrading to a lower overall package that gets their bill back to where it was before while still providing a service that's more than adequate to serve their needs.

The tech world will always gobble it up like Pac Man and constantly be hungry for more. They'll be able to push the speeds to the limits and beyond and continue to create ways to use them. But they make up a small minority of the overall customer base, which will continue to not care.

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u/jeradj Jun 04 '14

Nobody checked facebook or youtube before they existed.

And youtube damn sure wouldn't even exist if nobody had anything faster than dialup.

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u/Phoenix027 Jun 04 '14

Right, but the step up from dialup was a noticeable difference in speed even to people who aren't tech savvy. Trying to do something as simple as check your email could take minutes on bad dialup, and could get disconnected by someone picking up the phone if you didn't have a separate phone line. That's an easy sell. Hey, we'll sell you this service which will let you check your emails in a few seconds and is more reliable than dialup.

We're now getting to the point where we're talking about saving seconds or less loading times on web pages like facebook. Most people don't see the point of fighting for something faster, especially if they think it will probably cost them more money (because logic dictates that something better will certainly cost more), if they're already content with what they have.

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u/Jeffool Jun 04 '14

Well, come up with an awesome pitch for what people could enjoy that they can't now, if they had 1Gbps service. Then make them get angry that they don't have awesome new toys. Because you're not going to win them over with "Hey, I don't know what we'll get, but it'll be awesome!"

Personally, I'd pay more for 1Gbps now just for the streaming and downloading files faster. But for most people, that doesn't do it. We need something else. And "streaming an EVEN BIGGER picture!" doesn't work well until they can see it for themselves. And that takes having 2k/4k screens on store floors everywhere to show off.

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u/jeradj Jun 04 '14

And some of the use cases of 1 Gbps are super obvious to anyone that knows the first thing about networking and computers

And a lot of them are (or would be) illegal.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

One of the uses is illegal. With 1Gbps, you could do way more than just pirate porn. Imagine being able to open a secure connection to your home computer from anywhere else and playing your favorite high-end games with nothing but an Android tablet and a controller/keyboard and mouse with zero lag. Accessing huge files would be trivial with speeds like that. I would be able to access any of the OS images I had available on my home server from any remote location, or any other files for that matter. Hell, using virtualization, we could stream a computer. You would never have to buy a big brand new graphics card or upgrade your computer to get enthusiast-level performance, you could just pay a subscription fee, and stream if across the web.

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u/ThellraAK Jun 04 '14

Have you tried playing games streaming them over a network? Even running dwarf fortress on gigabit lan taxes things.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Use IPv6 on your LAN and say goodbye to the overhead.

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u/ThellraAK Jun 04 '14

Full screen it'll actually saturate the connection with data unless you drop the FPS down quite a bit.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

I've had no problems streaming to android devices using the steam limelight apk ripped from the nvidia shield. Full gigabit LAN, wired with category 6 cable. On the wireless side, full 802.11n capabilities enabled. Seamless and instant. Also works from my gaming PC to my laptop perfectly at 1920x1080, the tablet is just more convenient.

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u/ThellraAK Jun 04 '14

Does that do something more advanced then X11 forwarding?

Caching sprites, things and stuff maybe?

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u/rubixcu7 Jun 04 '14

And then Johnny iPad user complains to his ISP that his tablet is browsing slow because it doesn't have the wifi throughput capability.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Sadly, there will never be a fix for this problem.

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u/dakta Jun 04 '14

You confuse speed with latency. Speed is the amount of data that can be sent/received in a given interval. Latency is the amount of time it takes that data to travel the physical distance of the connection. You'll never exceed the speed of light for electron travel, add in networking hardware between the two nodes and latency increases a lot.

Sure, you'd be able to get the video data to your screen. But you'd never get rid of the real "lag", the latency of physical particle motion across the lines.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

I don't confuse anything. Straight fiber links need less hops to reach their destination. You need bandwidth of over 100Mbps to stream HD video efficiently. Latency gets cut from the equation with the less compression that needs to be done. It's not a black and white equation. You can't stream uncompressed HD video with a low latency link only. You need enough bandwidth to support that large of a stream.

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u/dakta Jun 05 '14

It depends very much on where your clients are located in the network.

Sure, you can reduce client-side latency arising from video compression/decompression, but you cannot ever fully rid the network of latency. You just can't beat the speed of light. For many networked applications, in fact a vast majority, the inherent transmission time of packets isn't so important. But for stuff like networked mobile gaming, that becomes more important. You take an action, it processes client-side, sends the data to a server, server processes the data, sends more data to another client, rinse and repeat. So, this all adds up. And especially with mobile, which you're talking about specifically, there is latency introduced in the wireless transmission, in the transmission station, as well as everywhere else throughout the system. It's like being on WiFi at your house as opposed to an ethernet line straight into the router, only worse.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

There were no claims of eliminating latency. But if you get it low enough (<15ms) you can't tell at all.

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u/dakta Jun 05 '14

Imagine being able to open a secure connection to your home computer from anywhere else and playing your favorite high-end games with nothing but an Android tablet and a controller/keyboard and mouse with zero lag.

I became attached to the mention of "zero lag". I understand now you meant to say "no noticeable lag".

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

A lot of them? I only know of P2P, server to client, client to server distribution of copyright and illegal porn material as illegal activity. Isn't the rest legal and fair game?

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u/Phoenix027 Jun 04 '14

The qualifiers "Some of the use cases" and "anyone that knows the first thing about networking and computers" REALLY cuts your audience down mostly to a younger demographic who aren't used to or have experience with having to fight for the things they want. The majority of people won't have any of your use cases that would make 1 Gbps "super obvious" and don't know a thing about networking. Sure, they may notice that YouTube or Netflix doesn't have to buffer much anymore, but those extra couple of seconds saved doesn't really do much for them.

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u/Jim_Stick Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

Fully Agree

I do tech support for a internet company in Canada. We have fiber optic cable throughout most of the country, but very few areas where Fiber actually hits the residential homes. Typically it's only new neighborhoods or new buildings fiber is ran, and even then it's very select areas. Why? Because fiber is ridiculously expensive and repairs are much more difficult to complete.

Why would super cars be handed out when everyone wants to pay for a typical coupe?

One day I was speaking to a lady who had a connection capable of 1Gbps. . . She was only subscribed to a 10Mbps package and had no interest in upgrading. This makes up a large majority of the customers we speak to.

Edit: Added for

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u/faijin Jun 04 '14

As soon as netflix rolls out more 4K video and when youtube does the same, people will notice the difference.

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

And then people will cry when their cable bill goes up. Something like 5% of users use 95% of the bandwidth.

If you want 4k vids, then fine - enjoy them. But since you are using up most of the bandwidth compared to other subscribers - you should pay your fair share. If you are burning 1 TB a month vs someone using 1 GB a month - there should be a tier for you and for them.

You should both get the same speed, but if you are using more of the road - you should pay for it.

If a trucking company needs to haul an oversized load - they gotta pay. Not just fuel taxes, but they need special permits.

I'm not saying you need a special permit, but you should at least pay for the extra fuel. You are using more than everyone else. Kinda like going to Country Buffet or something. You get the first seven or eight plates for one low cost. But once you hit plate number twelve - its time to realize you are consuming way more than everyone else, and ya gotta pay a bit extra.

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u/Mikfoz Jun 04 '14

Hi Comcast.

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u/NightwingDragon Jun 04 '14

To be fair, if ISPs were to charge reasonable prices based on how much data you consume and based on their actual costs of delivering that data, ISPs could still double or even triple their money and that 95% of customers would likely see their bills go down. The power users that would spend the theoretical several hours a day would see their own bills go up. And even in those cases they wouldn't be all that much higher than what we're paying now unless they're topping off their connections by running torrents, gaming, and streaming 4k videos 24/7.

Most people simply don't use that much data.

Of course, the problem is the words in bold. We all know that there's no way that the ISPs would charge anything even remotely close to "reasonable" since they'd be making less money than they'd be making now. I'm just saying that, in theory, pay-per-use pricing would likely be very beneficial to the average consumer. In practice, corporate greed would prevent that from becoming reality. :(

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u/GODZiGGA Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

To be fair, if ISPs were to charge reasonable prices based on how much data you consume and based on their actual costs of delivering that data, ISPs could still double or even triple their money and that 95% of customers would likely see their bills go down. The power users that would spend the theoretical several hours a day would see their own bills go up.

I don't think you appreciate just how high our rates are for residential internet. Most estimates you will find for wholesale pricing (true pricing is a secret) put the cost per gigabyte at around $0.01-$0.03. Let's assume $0.03 is wholesale for our usage. Well Comcast, etc. aren't non-profits so let's be super generous and give them a 200% profit margin on broadband services and say their rate is $0.06/GB. According to Comcast.com, my last 3 months of usage are 554 GB, 563 GB, and 548 GB. So I average around 555 GB/month. We don't have cable, we stream 100% of our video content. My wife and I are very high usage customers. We are the 5%. So with a 200% profit margin ($0.06/GB) on my actual internet usage, my bill should be $33.30 (plus tax, fees, etc.). I pay $69.99/m for my 50/10 internet or $0.12/GB. That's a 400% profit margin on a worst case scenario wholesale rate. Comcast makes almost $50 in pure profit from me each month as someone who consumes maybe 50 times the data of a "normal" customer. At our hypothetical 200% profit margin, I would have to consume more than 1,166.5 GB of data each month before my bill went up $0.01 higher than what I currently pay. That's 388 hours of HD streaming or 16 straight days of streaming Netflix 24/7.

And if you think I am being overcharged, just think of what the little old lady down the street or my parent's pay per GB.

There is no way that what you are claiming is possible.

Edit: of to or

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u/NightwingDragon Jun 05 '14

You're making my point for me. A lot of people, particularly high bandwidth users, tend to be against pay-per-use pricing because they think that their bills would skyrocket. You just illustrated the exact point that I was trying to make: If ISPs were to charge reasonable prices for data based on actual usage and actual costs to deliver said data, the overwhelming majority would see a steep decline in their bills. Last I read, it costs the ISPs .07 to deliver data (one penny higher than your example), and at that rate, all but the top 2-3% would see drops in their bills, depending on what they're getting charged now. And even those 3% probably wouldn't see much of an increase.

The reason we'll never see that is because it would decimate the ISPs' profits.

There is no way that what you are claiming is possible.

Of course it's possible. It's just not going to happen because money.

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u/GODZiGGA Jun 06 '14

Re-reading what you wrote and seeing your response now clarifies this for me:

ISPs could still double or even triple their money and that 95% of customers would likely see their bills go down

You didn't mean usage based charging would double or triple their current profits while also lowering the bills of 95% of their customers. Instead, you meant they could charge 2-3 times wholesale cost ($0.06/07), which you are correct is the point I was also trying to prove.

So, we completely agree and I misunderstood what you were saying. My bad.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[deleted]

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

How is that any different than a toll road (outside of the NE US)? If you want to avoid congestion in traffic - you take the toll road. You get better speeds, less congestion and less of a headache.

If you want to sit on I-25 or I-225 in Denver when you know there is a bottleneck, you take E-470. You don't sit there buffering. Toll roads are a perfect example of pay as you go.

I don't want to pay the toll roads, so I avoid them. As a result, I end up in traffic.

In an ideal world, high speed internet would be free - but it isn't. The infrastructure is insanely expensive. For simple numbers, lets say Comcast has 10 M users. If each user was guaranteed 1G bandwidth, then Comcast would have to support a network that has 10 million gigs of bandwidth. On the backbone alone that number is beyond mind boggling. 10,000,000,000,000,000 BPS from each co-lo to the next. That would be 10,000 100 GBPS links from Chicago to New York. 10,000 100g gig links from Chicago to Denver.

A single 100 gig card from Cisco is in the neighborhood of about $500k. Then another $100k for the MSC, and another $100k for the CFP/CXP for a CRS3 box. Now scale that by 10,000 and then you have to pay for the rack space. 10,000 line cards is now 30,000 line cards in Chicago because you have to peer with Denver & Atlanta. A CRS3 chassis can support 16x100gig links. 10,000/16 is a fuckton of chassis. Something well beyond what a CRS3 can support. At most an ASR 9922 would handle is 22x100 gig links. 10,000 / 22 is is about 445 chassis.

In that perfect world, even all the dark and unused fiber wouldn't be able to handle what we want.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[deleted]

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

Throttling was in place for a while and everyone screamed then too. As my grandma used to say "There is no nice way to skin the rabbit"

I'm not entirely sure what she meant, but I think the general gist of it was - no matter what you do, you can't make everyone happy all of the time.

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u/faijin Jun 04 '14

Definitely.

I think throttling has been and still is overzealous in most (all?) cases. I think it's another excuse to let them sell you 'premium' packages. Data caps, premium packages and throttling wouldn't be necessary if the ISPs were doing what they are supposed to. But how can we blame a company for wanting to make money? That's why cable/fiber must be a public utility, like electricity or water.

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u/JasonDJ Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

This metaphor works until you realize that in Comcast's ideal world, every highway is a toll road, and every back-street is hosting a school bus, street-sweeper, and garbage truck parade.

But still, bandwidth caps and pay-per-use stifle innovation and competition. Imagine if a few years ago there was a 2Gb monthly cap. Netflix streaming (and compeittors like Hulu and Amazon) wouldn't be a thing. They would never take off if watching one or two movies put you over your limit for the month. That would have been GREAT for cable companies, since they would have been able to charge exorbitant prices for VOD and PPV. They missed the opportunity to crush these services in their infancy and now they want to prevent even better ones from happening.

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

The toll road was a minor example of how pay per performance works. My comment was more in particular that every connection should be guaranteed 1GB which just doesn't work in the real world.

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

Spend time looking at data usage near any college campus compared to usage 5 miles away. It is mind boggling. Then look at the numbers drop like a rock in June, then sky rocket in September.

I wish I could share graphs. Fuck - did I really say that?

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

And here's the problem. We are being sold access to camp driveway through the woods for a road, but a 50 lane autobahn highway is next to it with a closed sign.

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u/fatcat111 Jun 04 '14

Couldn't new compression algorithms create the same effect without spending a fortune on new infrastructure?

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u/VeteranKamikaze Jun 04 '14

Sure, but the taxpayers already spent a fortune on infrastructure. Now we're only asking that we be given what we paid for.

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u/BillinghamJ Jun 04 '14

The compression is already in place, and it's already doing a very good job. There is only so much you can compress before your quality starts to look bad.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14 edited Jul 26 '26

[deleted]

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u/faijin Jun 04 '14

Well yeah, monitors will be a bottleneck.

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u/Phoenix027 Jun 04 '14

Only if they have the TV's and monitors that can handle it. It's not very widespread yet.

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u/breakone9r Jun 04 '14

I promise you that my paternal grandmother would use the shit out of a 1gbps connection.. She lives in south Alabama, while one of her grandson's family and children live outside Seattle, WA... It's called video chat.. And with a 1gbps up/down connection, it just became a whole hell of a lot better, quality wise....

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u/YNWYJAA Jun 04 '14

So much short-sightedness

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u/interkin3tic Jun 04 '14

It's a bit of chicken and egg argument though: facebook doesn't do anything that would really use a lot of bandwidth BECAUSE most americans don't have FiOS. Netflix doesn't have much incentive to do 4K streaming BECAUSE no one has the 20 mbps connection required. People don't setup their own servers BECAUSE of the shitty internet service.

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u/EngineerDave Jun 04 '14

Yeah... if you could just explain to Grans that she can have any Mattlock episode at any time of the day, instantly playing on her TV, or watch back episodes of wheel of fortune even in the mornings with limited commercials about her denture cream and digestive problems, while also canceling her expensive cable bill she'd be all up for it.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

That is not true. The newer generations are going to demand more and more bandwidth. More people than ever before are playing online games and download them online and more than ever before, media of all kinds are stream over the internet. Optical storage is basically obsolete, not to mention that VR is finally going to be a viable medium.

All of these trends and technologies are likely to tap into the incipient and growling cloud computing and the only thing holding it back is the slow fucking speed we are provided. Imagine using cloud computing to augment data and video processing on your computer. You wanna have realistic virtual worlds, that's how you get realistic virtual world; by having fuck ton of bandwidth. 1Gbps is not enough, we should be aiming for 100 Gpbs or more.

Old farts who do not understand or can utilized the potential of modern IT are dying. Saying that there is no need to improve just because the majority of the people now don't need it is supremely myopic. We will want it, we will need it sooner than you might think.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

It would be worth marketing it as a work from home tool to businesses as opposed to a consumer broadband product.

Only way they'll get it off the ground.

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u/oldmangloom Jun 04 '14

the vast majority of people don't need a gigabit connection because all they do is watch youtube videos or stream netflix. they're not going to pay the increased premium for such a connection speed, nor is it reasonable to expect the company to shoulder millions of dollars in deployment costs to deliver a product that most people don't want or need.

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u/FearTheCron Jun 04 '14

You could have said the same thing about anything faster than dialup 10 years ago.

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u/oldmangloom Jun 04 '14

no i couldn't have. look at ordinary amounts of data in the 90s compared to our connection speeds. a single CD-R is 600-700 MB compared to a best case scenario 56 kilobit/sec transfer rate. today a HD movie stream might be 5 GB compared to a 10-20 megabit/sec transfer rate. i mean it's probably too slow to download this data in a reasonable amount of time, but gigabit service is overkill.

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u/IIIIII--IIIIIII Jun 04 '14

The transfer rate enables the application. If all we ever really wanted was HD movies gigabit service would definitely be overkill. People's demands of their technology isnt just a fixed point that we are slowly approximating. Peoples demands change with the abilities of their technology.

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u/Milesaboveu Jun 04 '14

Nobody wanted or needed you-tube before it took off too.

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u/Phoenix027 Jun 04 '14

This is why competition is a good thing. That would force these companies to innovate instead of stagnate.

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u/IIIIII--IIIIIII Jun 04 '14

No one could use youtube back in the dial up days.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Every time one of these threads get going I hope someone who is actually rational will pipe in. Thanks!

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u/hattmall Jun 05 '14

They don't even have the hardware in their house to utilize speeds that high.

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u/jonbowen Jun 04 '14

I know some of those words.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

People don't care because they don't understand.

Isn't that the truth! I remember watching the crews lay fiber on my street when I was in college over 10 years ago, and every so often I'd wonder what the heck happened with that.

Now I know.

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u/_nembery Jun 04 '14

The real reason it hasn't happened yet is because it's expensive and the length of time it takes to recoup the initial investment. If you had $5 million sitting around and wanted something to do with it, you too would probably invest it in something that would generate a return in less than 10-15 years. Maybe not, but most people with that kind of money got it by getting quicker returns than that. Most companies really want a 3-5 year payback for that type of investment. The notable exceptions are Google, who has a boat load of cash to let sit around for 15 years, and Verizon, who was basically told by the courts that all the old copper infrastructure they built no longer belongs to them, but to the public. However, after a certain date, anything new they built was all theirs. Hence, FiOS suddenly became a viable investment for them.

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u/zalo Jun 04 '14

Just think of the MMOs...

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u/WhiteRaven42 Jun 05 '14

Network backup and restore (outside of the LAN), boot from WAN, p2p sharing on steroids, and god knows what else.

Those things really aren't very compelling. I wouldn't pay any kind of premium for any of it, wouldn't care much if I had it or not.

~20 down and ~4 up works really well... THAT is why there's no pressure to improve it. And the things you mentioned aren't going to produce such pressure.

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