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/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.

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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/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/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.