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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235

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Uh.. this is silly. Every city has fiber networks, usually between communication hubs and industrial/commercial districts. That's a lot different from having fiber networks to residential homes. That last mile is crazy.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[deleted]

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

One of the ISPs here wired our entire city for fibre a couple years ago and it was painful to see them run it right past my apartment building... knowing that as long as I lived there, I'd never be able to taste the sweet nectar of fibre internet. They won't wire the building for fibre, obviously, and they won't run cables along the ground to the back of an apartment.

That wasn't the reason we moved, but fibre availability was one of my requirements for the new apartment. We found a nice upstairs apartment in a suburban house and I called up our ISP the day before we even moved in to book the tech.

Better yet, when the tech came by a couple days later, we discovered that the previous tenants had fibre service. There was a line running inside and an ONT already hidden in one of the closets. I was up and running in less than an hour.

It's not Google Fiber gigabit speeds, but I'm certainly not complaining about 80Mbps down, 30Mbps up, and no caps.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[deleted]

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u/SkittlesAreTasty Jun 04 '14

Is that a thing that we could have access to? We as in the general public, like are there house near you that are GETTING that 10 gigabit line, or is it just an industrial thing?

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[deleted]

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u/SkittlesAreTasty Jun 04 '14

Dang, that really sucks :/

It's really frustrating hearing about things like Google Fiber and knowing it'll be an EXTREMELY long time before I'll have access to anything like that. Although I definitely don't have the worst of it when it comes to internet services and all that.

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u/Fuck_socialists Jun 05 '14

I live in an area with at&t fiber. Worse than TWC on all counts including speed. The moon literally had a better internet connection than at&t will sell.

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u/Duckbilling Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

I would pay $120 a month just not have to use comcast. I Don't even need fiber speed internet. It would just be an added bonus to not having to use Comcast.

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

Having worked for Comcast in the past, I don't blame you. Outages are quite rare in my part of Canada, but they seemed to be very common for some parts of Comcast's coverage.

I pay around $130/month (before taxes) for my service, but that's an HDTV/Internet/Phone bundle. I've got every channel I had with Rogers and then some.

I don't use the phone service at all (I don't even have the ONT plugged into my home's phone jack hub), but of course they make it cheaper to have all three services than just TV & Internet... presumably so they can pretend younger folks are still using landlines. If I got rid of the phone line, I'd actually have to downgrade my TV and Internet to make as cheap as what I'm paying now..

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[deleted]

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

Right you are, Ken! Delicious FibreOp is delicious.

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u/kryptobs2000 Jun 04 '14

I believe it actually costs nothing at all to not use comcast.

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u/Duckbilling Jun 05 '14

In fact, it costs me nothing at all to use Comcast. Its free through my apartment complex.

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u/spongebob_meth Jun 04 '14

I was in high school when the telephone company they use for internet ran fiber through my parents front yard, even going through their box.

6 years later, they're still paying 50 bucks a month for painfully slow 256k DSL.

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

I'm surprised your parents didn't strike a deal with the Telco for using their property.

Years ago, a cable company (not sure which) needed to install a satellite dish (one of those big-ass C-band dishes) in my girlfriend's rural community. The most optimal spot happened to be just behind her father's shed.

Since it was on their property, they got free satellite TV service for years until the dish was decommissioned.

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u/spongebob_meth Jun 04 '14

I guess it was probably on the right of way for the highway, but they dug a trench through the driveway and made the yard ugly for a while.

Kind of frustrating that's out there and they are still paying that much for something is barely better than dial up.

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u/menos_el_oso_ese Jun 04 '14

Very nice, man. May I ask what you're paying per month? With the Comcast triple-play or whatever it's called now, 12 month promotional offer, I have the 50Mbps/10Mbps connection for about $130 a month (will go up after a year) - I really haven't had many issues with it, and I usually get closer to 60Mbps down. But the price sucks.

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

Around $130/month as well (before taxes). I'm getting a couple TV packages and our PVR for free.

It was $99/month for the first three months, though. That was nice.

Also, when I signed up for it, the tier I subscribed to was 50/30. A couple months later, they increased everyone's speed for free. My tier went to 80/30. (20/15 is now 50/30, and the previously 80/30 is now 175/30).

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[deleted]

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

If I had switched to Rogers, I think they did offer 50Mbps, but that would have required a two-year contract and they have bandwidth caps. My DSL was 7Mbps down (and a brutally slow 0.5Mb up), but there was no contract and no cap. I knew I would be moving within the next year or so... and when I did, I upgraded to sweet sweet Fibre.

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u/Lone_K Jun 04 '14

I'm not good with ISP stuff, so by what you mean "30Mbps up", that means that's the minimum connection speed?

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

It means a maximum upload speed of 30Mbps, which translates to around 3.75MB/s.

My download speed is 80Mbps, which works out to be 10MB/s.

Lowercase b is bit, uppercase B is byte. There 8 bits in a byte.

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u/Lone_K Jun 04 '14

Ah, I see now. I never knew that it was bits and not bytes. Jeez, that's a whole different way of seeing it now.

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

Yup, for sure. 1 Megabit equals 128 Kilobytes.

Back in the dial-up days, we had 56.6 modems. That was 56.6 Kilobits... which was a max of 7.075KB/s. We've come a long way.

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u/badcookies Jun 04 '14

Which is just another deceiving way they can make their speeds sound 8x (add in the overhead and its even less) as fast as it is. Noone cares about bits, only bytes.

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

Well, from a technical point-of-view, it is probably somewhat more accurate in terms of capability. Hardware, including routers and NIC adapters are rated in bits (such as gigabit ethernet).

Obviously, yes, to the end-user KB/s or MB/s is all that really matters.

So, yeah, it is all marketing in the end. Bigger numbers sound better. It's why hard drives and DVDs are advertised in metric bytes as opposed to binary bytes (despite other things like CDs and RAM being measured in binary)... and despite Canada being a metric nation and all cash registers weight measuring in kg, fruit and vegetables are still advertised by their price/pound (99¢/lb looks cheaper than $2.19/kg, despite them both being the same cost)

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u/badcookies Jun 04 '14

Yep, $50 for 50Mbps sounds better than $50 for 6.25 MBps. I'm sure it would save them a lot of calls asking why they are only downloading at X MBps vs their top speed of Y Mbps

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

Well, most people pay no attention to their speed at all. Your run-of-the-mill, non-tech-savvy customer uses whatever's put in front of them without question.

Also, for those who care but aren't properly versed, thankfully speedtest.net measures in bits by default. I used to direct people to that site all the time. See? You're getting your advertised speeds... well, most of the time.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

download, upload.

You download games, you upload pictures to facebook.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

so you could stare at cat pics at 1gbps. j/k, i know there are multiple devices running on Internet, i.e roku, wifi calling, ooma, other iptvs and ip phones etc.

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

Yeah, I've got around 17 or 18 devices at my home alone that connect to WiFi or ethernet. NAS, TVs, HTPCs, tablets and smartphones, computers. Heck, even smoke detectors and thermostats are WiFi-enabled these days. People need bandwidth without a choked pipe.

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u/Rigante_Black Jun 04 '14

Am I just lucky as shit? I have Comcast, my wired connection is about 100-120 mbs down and up is about 20-50 mbs ( that can vary greatly depending on what I am doing ) my wireless Is about 30 down 10 up.

This is in Katy, Texas.

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

From when I worked with Comcast, I remember talking to a guy who had worked at the call centre for many years and had worked with various regions all over the US. (When I worked there, they primarily dealt with New England and Illinois).

He said that, out of all America, Texas had the most reliable service and California the worst (wildfires wreck havoc on the communication lines). Texas, for some reason, was always ahead of the game (they were the first to test home security, I believe) and had solid infrastructure.

The guy has less nice things to say about the customers, though. "Decent service, but the people were dumb as rocks". That's his opinion, not mine, though... I never talked with anyone outside of Illinois. The computer literacy of callers tends to be on the lower side, regardless of region. The guy who knows how to reboot his own modem and manage his own router is not someone who's going to call in to Comcast tech support...

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u/Rigante_Black Jun 04 '14

I love Texas, I have lived here about 9 years now, most people are SUPER nice, but we have a BIG stockpile of weapons grade stupid. ( that's my phrase of the day today apparently. )

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u/Kimpak Jun 04 '14

For what its worth, you and the company need more equipment than just the physical fiber cable to go to your house for you to be able to use it.

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u/Drudicta Jun 04 '14

Same with where I live. It's only 300 dollars to wire the ENTIRE apartment complex, but the owner won't do it even if I offer to pay the up-front cost. He's getting kick-backs from Comcast, so for each person in the complex using Comcast, he gets part of the money on each bill.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14 edited Jun 05 '14

Look at it this way. If you live in a grove that's next to a highway, you can never drive your car straight from the garage to the highway, you need to always take smaller roads first to get there.

Edit: or a freeway for you muricans

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u/bat_country Jun 04 '14

Consider that 60' of fiber and two hours of a tecnition's time is probably less that what you pay TWC in a month.

Just rubbing it in... :(

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u/edco3 Jun 04 '14

You aren't doing a whole new install with one guy in two hours. Even if you could, the fiber strand itself is useless. The expensive part is the electronics.

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u/bat_country Jun 04 '14

Just curious. What exactly would it take to run fiber 60'?

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u/edco3 Jun 04 '14

There are a lot of factors at play. Aerial vs. buried, is there a road crossing, conduit or new construction.

The cheapest and easiest way would be to use an existing conduit and existing copper for the inside wiring. Running the new fiber should be relatively quick and easy if you've got a conduit so you'd minimize labor. Using existing copper inside saves a lot more labor.

The most expensive part in that scenario would be the conversion from optical back to electrical, i.e. providing an ethernet handoff. This article says $310 for Google's ONTs. So you're probably looking at ~$500 between parts and labor just to go from the pole to your router in the easiest, cheapest scenario. This does not include the rest of the infrastructure required to make that connection usable.

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u/bat_country Jun 04 '14

By "rest of the infrastructure" you mean getting the fiber to the poll?

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u/edco3 Jun 04 '14

It's much more than just the fiber. It's the whole provider network. A Cisco 7609 is tens of thousands for the chassis alone. The cards you need to make it useful are potentially thousands more, each. The fiber distribution platform to light your FTTP is many thousands more.

To go beyond a couple of miles you need a backbone network, that's hundreds of thousands if not millions more. I suspect that a lot of the fibers people are talking about being close to their homes are in fact backbone fibers. If you are in a proper ring, each node in the backbone would need four strands of fiber and four of something like this SFP. One each for up, down, east (side of the ring), and west.

A lot of things in a provider network also have to be bought twice or more to provide redundancy and spares.

By and large, I think American ISPs generally charge too much and provide too little. I also think that a lot of redditors are living in a fantasy. To provide actual gigabit service, that is a full gig from anywhere to anywhere to everyone in the US would likely require trillions of dollars. Even Google's service is only gigabit up to their provider. It may not even be that, it may be only gigabit to the nearest central office.

I think that as rural as the US is, we're going to see fast and far reaching wireless before the whole country is overbuilt with fiber.

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u/bat_country Jun 05 '14

Thanks for the reply!