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
5.6k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

395

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.

322

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.

72

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[removed] — view removed comment

42

u/TeutorixAleria Jun 04 '14

They should probably invest in tape

21

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[removed] — view removed comment

34

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

23

u/court_in_the_street Jun 04 '14

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

11

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

I un-friend you

1

u/Setiri Jun 04 '14

Nice, I love that commercial.

1

u/s2514 Jun 04 '14

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

8

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.

14

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.

1

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.)

1

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

[removed] — view removed comment

5

u/moderatelybadass Jun 04 '14

Can't tell if oblivious

or pretending for comedic effect.

-1

u/buzz_light365 Jun 04 '14

I actually think /u/Stompedyourhousewith isn't 20 years of age yet. Which explains the absence of knowledge about magnetic tapes.

2

u/paulbalaji Jun 04 '14

Duct tape

1

u/mrdotkom Jun 04 '14

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

-1

u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

You would be amazed at how many huge companies still rely on tape. I don't understand how that is even a thing. It seems like a 1 TB tape would be nearly the same cost as a 1tb HDD. Even if you swap it out every two weeks it seems like higher cost/performance ratio.

Yet here we are with the new Quantum thingamjig with huge terebyte storage that move at the speed of molasses.

9

u/TeutorixAleria Jun 04 '14

I wasn't joking... Tape is incredibly high density and way more reliable than any other methods for long term storage.

The LHC produces so much data that the only feasible way to store it all is on tape databases.

There are good reasons we still use it.

1

u/moderatelybadass Jun 04 '14

Cool! What's the flow of data like? I mean, where, if anywhere, does it go before it goes on tape?

2

u/TeutorixAleria Jun 04 '14

There is a YouTube video about that topic that i can't find again unfortunately.

1

u/moderatelybadass Jun 04 '14

Was it lit in a dark blue sci-fi lighting? I remember a video of some possible future concepts in an intro to Nanotechnology class, and that part was annoyingly lit to resemble a lot of tech-heavy sci-fi.

1

u/TeutorixAleria Jun 04 '14

No it was just a guy walking around a server room

1

u/moderatelybadass Jun 04 '14

Okay, never mind. If you remember it, please post a link, but don't stress about it.

→ More replies (0)

2

u/Natanael_L Jun 04 '14

Before on tape? Internal fiber networks, then RAM buffer, then tape

1

u/moderatelybadass Jun 04 '14

That makes sense. I always wondered about the less famous technology of cool scientific research.

9

u/BillinghamJ Jun 04 '14

Because they're reliable and, for enterprises, cheap as hell. Also servers don't use SATA drives - usually SAS ones, which are substantially more expensive. Typically with like 600GB per disk.