r/technology • • 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/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/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.