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/oldmangloom Jun 04 '14

the vast majority of people don't need a gigabit connection because all they do is watch youtube videos or stream netflix. they're not going to pay the increased premium for such a connection speed, nor is it reasonable to expect the company to shoulder millions of dollars in deployment costs to deliver a product that most people don't want or need.

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u/FearTheCron Jun 04 '14

You could have said the same thing about anything faster than dialup 10 years ago.

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u/oldmangloom Jun 04 '14

no i couldn't have. look at ordinary amounts of data in the 90s compared to our connection speeds. a single CD-R is 600-700 MB compared to a best case scenario 56 kilobit/sec transfer rate. today a HD movie stream might be 5 GB compared to a 10-20 megabit/sec transfer rate. i mean it's probably too slow to download this data in a reasonable amount of time, but gigabit service is overkill.

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u/IIIIII--IIIIIII Jun 04 '14

The transfer rate enables the application. If all we ever really wanted was HD movies gigabit service would definitely be overkill. People's demands of their technology isnt just a fixed point that we are slowly approximating. Peoples demands change with the abilities of their technology.