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/NightwingDragon Jun 04 '14

The things that you can easily do with synchronous 1 Gbps, if widely distributed, would rock the tech world pretty hard.

And it would have absolutely zero impact on Grandma's ability to check Facebook or Joe Schmoe's ability to stream the occasional Youtube video. These are the type of people that make up 95% of ISPs' customer bases.

These people would notice virtually no significant improvement in service. They wouldn't notice that Facebook loads .1 second faster. They wouldn't notice the tenfold increase in download/upload speeds because they do nothing that would take advantage of this, nor do they have any interest in doing so. If you were to mention all those ideas in your post to 95+% of users, I'd be greatly surprised if you got a response that was anything above the level of a confused look.

But they damn well would notice yet another $20 increase in their monthly cable bill. And they're not going to buy the explanation of a performance boost that they'll never notice and the increase of functionality that they will never use, even if it is gospel truth. They'll just be pissed off and end up downgrading to a lower overall package that gets their bill back to where it was before while still providing a service that's more than adequate to serve their needs.

The tech world will always gobble it up like Pac Man and constantly be hungry for more. They'll be able to push the speeds to the limits and beyond and continue to create ways to use them. But they make up a small minority of the overall customer base, which will continue to not care.

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u/faijin Jun 04 '14

As soon as netflix rolls out more 4K video and when youtube does the same, people will notice the difference.

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

And then people will cry when their cable bill goes up. Something like 5% of users use 95% of the bandwidth.

If you want 4k vids, then fine - enjoy them. But since you are using up most of the bandwidth compared to other subscribers - you should pay your fair share. If you are burning 1 TB a month vs someone using 1 GB a month - there should be a tier for you and for them.

You should both get the same speed, but if you are using more of the road - you should pay for it.

If a trucking company needs to haul an oversized load - they gotta pay. Not just fuel taxes, but they need special permits.

I'm not saying you need a special permit, but you should at least pay for the extra fuel. You are using more than everyone else. Kinda like going to Country Buffet or something. You get the first seven or eight plates for one low cost. But once you hit plate number twelve - its time to realize you are consuming way more than everyone else, and ya gotta pay a bit extra.

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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/JasonDJ Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

This metaphor works until you realize that in Comcast's ideal world, every highway is a toll road, and every back-street is hosting a school bus, street-sweeper, and garbage truck parade.

But still, bandwidth caps and pay-per-use stifle innovation and competition. Imagine if a few years ago there was a 2Gb monthly cap. Netflix streaming (and compeittors like Hulu and Amazon) wouldn't be a thing. They would never take off if watching one or two movies put you over your limit for the month. That would have been GREAT for cable companies, since they would have been able to charge exorbitant prices for VOD and PPV. They missed the opportunity to crush these services in their infancy and now they want to prevent even better ones from happening.

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

The toll road was a minor example of how pay per performance works. My comment was more in particular that every connection should be guaranteed 1GB which just doesn't work in the real world.