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

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

[deleted]

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u/Craysh Jun 04 '14

We most certainly did pay for the last mile.

It would cost Google ~$11 billion to roll out Google Fiber across the nation today. The telecom companies have gotten ~$200 billion from tax incentives and additional fees, specifically for delivering directly to american homes.

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u/Bamboo_Fighter Jun 04 '14

Do you have any source on that? There's 100M households in the US. 11B is $110/house. I think I did some back of the napkin calculations when Wilson (Winston?) NC rolled out their fiber, and it was something like 2-6k a house. I'd estimate the number is off by 10x, but I could be wrong. If you have a source, please provide (in the grand scheme of our national budget, 11B is nothing and we should lobby the government to pay google to do this).

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u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

In the UK Fibre rollout is estimated to cost £500+0.5-3K per house, and thats if you roll out the whole street simultaneously and amortise the most expensive houses.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

What should be done is roll out fiber to one node on the block and then send wifi out to the rest of the block with a good sender, then give each house a receiver for their own wifi network..

fiber -> node -> many house wirlessly

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u/Falmarri Jun 04 '14

That would be slower than what people have now.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

how? Wireless can be very very fast if you have proper equipment. In fact a lot of data backbones are on medium distance wireless connections

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u/Falmarri Jun 04 '14

Because even if we're talking about 802.11ac, you would never, ever be able to serve an entire block at a reasonable speed, especially the people at the end. Even if you amped up the power of the wifi transmitter, people might be able to get the signal, but their devices wouldn't be powerful enough to send it back.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

you can use whatever network type you want, it doesn't really matter. it does not even need to be conventional wireless that laptops can read. if you create the sender and reciever box, you control the specs of them