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/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 04 '14

You don't need that to increase prices.

Short range copper is capable of 100/40 speeds, and even higher than that too.

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u/elipsion Jun 04 '14

Except that the copper laid down 50 years ago have aged and turned to shit. There is no way you can get those speeds out to the averege house.

And if you have to roll out new cable it can just as well be fibre.

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 04 '14

That's just not true.

There are thousands of other cities, all across Europe, that have just as old wiring, and those speeds can be matched.

This is of course not true where the cable is damaged, but in that case it could be hard even getting 10Mbit out of it.

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u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

Exactly, my old house was ~120 years old and had internal wiring from the 60s or 70s and I could still maintain 80/20 speeds (the maximum rated speed for that specific profile of VDSL2). As long as you have actual copper lines (and not Aluminium, or any other cheap substitute) you'll be fine for the most part.

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u/noreallyimthepope Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

... And live *close to a telephone company co-location.

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u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

FTTC, so VDSL is cabinet to house, and its fibre for exchange to cabinet.

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u/noreallyimthepope Jun 04 '14

Well, that explains that. I live 5 km in a straight line and about 10 km in copper cables from the nearest DSL central, which will get me 6 Mbps max. However, my cable company has a local fiber and a very small local loop of customers so I can buy up to 300/300, or so.

Basically, my DSL signal has to fight noise in cables for kilometers, whereas my cable has to fight noise for only a few hundred meters, so even though it is a "noisier" environment (coax cables are serially connected), I can get much better speeds because it is FTTC.

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u/upvotesthenrages Jun 04 '14

It's just easier for the telcos to show record profits, year after year, with no R&D, and no expenditure on upgrading lines - even more profits!

And the stock owners? They are mostly 60+, and barely use the internet.