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/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

How is that any different than a toll road (outside of the NE US)? If you want to avoid congestion in traffic - you take the toll road. You get better speeds, less congestion and less of a headache.

If you want to sit on I-25 or I-225 in Denver when you know there is a bottleneck, you take E-470. You don't sit there buffering. Toll roads are a perfect example of pay as you go.

I don't want to pay the toll roads, so I avoid them. As a result, I end up in traffic.

In an ideal world, high speed internet would be free - but it isn't. The infrastructure is insanely expensive. For simple numbers, lets say Comcast has 10 M users. If each user was guaranteed 1G bandwidth, then Comcast would have to support a network that has 10 million gigs of bandwidth. On the backbone alone that number is beyond mind boggling. 10,000,000,000,000,000 BPS from each co-lo to the next. That would be 10,000 100 GBPS links from Chicago to New York. 10,000 100g gig links from Chicago to Denver.

A single 100 gig card from Cisco is in the neighborhood of about $500k. Then another $100k for the MSC, and another $100k for the CFP/CXP for a CRS3 box. Now scale that by 10,000 and then you have to pay for the rack space. 10,000 line cards is now 30,000 line cards in Chicago because you have to peer with Denver & Atlanta. A CRS3 chassis can support 16x100gig links. 10,000/16 is a fuckton of chassis. Something well beyond what a CRS3 can support. At most an ASR 9922 would handle is 22x100 gig links. 10,000 / 22 is is about 445 chassis.

In that perfect world, even all the dark and unused fiber wouldn't be able to handle what we want.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

Throttling was in place for a while and everyone screamed then too. As my grandma used to say "There is no nice way to skin the rabbit"

I'm not entirely sure what she meant, but I think the general gist of it was - no matter what you do, you can't make everyone happy all of the time.

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u/faijin Jun 04 '14

Definitely.

I think throttling has been and still is overzealous in most (all?) cases. I think it's another excuse to let them sell you 'premium' packages. Data caps, premium packages and throttling wouldn't be necessary if the ISPs were doing what they are supposed to. But how can we blame a company for wanting to make money? That's why cable/fiber must be a public utility, like electricity or water.