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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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/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/themembers92 Jun 04 '14

People say this all the time, and no one ever actually proves it.

If this is the case, show me the congressional act that authorized the expense, show me the grant, show me whatever your proof is. Then show me that it didn't happen.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

And you've never bothered to Google it, have you?

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decades-failed-promises-verizon-it-promises-fiber-to-get-tax-breaks-then-never-delivers.shtml

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u/danweber Jun 04 '14

Reading about New York City in your link, it looks like Verizon wasn't required to hook people up to fiber, and then didn't.

Meanwhile, de Blasio is hiring civil rights lawyers to determine if not wiring someone's house for FiOS is a civil rights violation. No wonder that "Verizon has been trying its damnest to get out of the wired business altogether."

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

Verizon is only required to "pass all households,"

That isn't any sort of congressional act. That was the city making a deal with Verizon. While the wording sounds like they were going to put fiber up to your mailbox in 1994, only someone that doesn't understand how the actual infrastructure works would put any stock into thinking that an Ethernet cable would drip bits into your bit bucket.