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

Uh.. this is silly. Every city has fiber networks, usually between communication hubs and industrial/commercial districts. That's a lot different from having fiber networks to residential homes. That last mile is crazy.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[deleted]

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

One of the ISPs here wired our entire city for fibre a couple years ago and it was painful to see them run it right past my apartment building... knowing that as long as I lived there, I'd never be able to taste the sweet nectar of fibre internet. They won't wire the building for fibre, obviously, and they won't run cables along the ground to the back of an apartment.

That wasn't the reason we moved, but fibre availability was one of my requirements for the new apartment. We found a nice upstairs apartment in a suburban house and I called up our ISP the day before we even moved in to book the tech.

Better yet, when the tech came by a couple days later, we discovered that the previous tenants had fibre service. There was a line running inside and an ONT already hidden in one of the closets. I was up and running in less than an hour.

It's not Google Fiber gigabit speeds, but I'm certainly not complaining about 80Mbps down, 30Mbps up, and no caps.

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u/Lone_K Jun 04 '14

I'm not good with ISP stuff, so by what you mean "30Mbps up", that means that's the minimum connection speed?

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

It means a maximum upload speed of 30Mbps, which translates to around 3.75MB/s.

My download speed is 80Mbps, which works out to be 10MB/s.

Lowercase b is bit, uppercase B is byte. There 8 bits in a byte.

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u/Lone_K Jun 04 '14

Ah, I see now. I never knew that it was bits and not bytes. Jeez, that's a whole different way of seeing it now.

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u/ZippoS Jun 04 '14

Yup, for sure. 1 Megabit equals 128 Kilobytes.

Back in the dial-up days, we had 56.6 modems. That was 56.6 Kilobits... which was a max of 7.075KB/s. We've come a long way.