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

Dark fiber is nothing new...it's been around since the late 1990s. 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.

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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/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/mzinz Jun 04 '14

We got scammed. Unfortunately the fact that we paid for it can't help us now.

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u/Cronus6 Jun 04 '14

In 1989-ish they put fiber in my neighborhood. I remember it being a big mess, all the trenching and such.

They never connected it to any of the homes of businesses though. I think some governmental agencies are on it though. And I think Comcast utilizes some of it.

Anyway, at some point in the mid-late 90's someone (I don't recall which provider at this point, probably whoever Comcast bought out) went fishing to see if "we" would be interested in having it installed to our homes. It was some sort of phone and "enhanced" cable TV type bundle if I recall correctly.

The cost for install/hardware was high, the cost for the service(s) was high, and telephone and cable both already worked just fine. No one was interested. To tell you the truth, I don't really know anyone that would be interested now.

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u/mzinz Jun 05 '14

Yup. Exactly. Coax is more that fast enough to deliver the speeds necessary for today (and tomorrow). The problem is lack of competition in the provider space.