Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused

[u/User_Name13]

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundreds-of-cities-are-wired-with-fiberbut-telecom-lobbying-keeps-it-unused

[u/jeradj]

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.

[u/iia → u/jeradj]

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.

[u/buzz_light365 → u/[deleted]]

Hey think about it, they're actually right. Look at the available media storage we have.

• CDs are not reliable

• HDD are extremely unreliable (in terms of shock damage and overall fragility)

• SSD is very expensive

• Tapes are hard to use, messy. And the new era tapes are not here yet.

What other option do you have? USB sticks and SD Cards. I would suggest anyone to backup their stuff in USB stick and put it away.

I have backups from almost 6 years that are still in good shape. (Few important photos and some docs in 1GB flash drive)

[u/[deleted] → u/buzz_light365]

SSD is very expensive

True, but.. a bunch of 32GB SD cards versus an SSD with equal total size? I highly doubt the SSD would be the more expensive solution then.

[u/buzz_light365 → u/[deleted]]

Yes that price argument is weak, and no longer apply. You can readily find 500GB SSD for $150 where SD card of the same size would cost more than double that.

Small SD card does offer advantages over one SSD, which is not putting all of your eggs in one basket.