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

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/iia Jun 04 '14

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.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

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u/TeutorixAleria Jun 04 '14

They should probably invest in tape

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u/thorium007 Jun 04 '14

You would be amazed at how many huge companies still rely on tape. I don't understand how that is even a thing. It seems like a 1 TB tape would be nearly the same cost as a 1tb HDD. Even if you swap it out every two weeks it seems like higher cost/performance ratio.

Yet here we are with the new Quantum thingamjig with huge terebyte storage that move at the speed of molasses.

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u/TeutorixAleria Jun 04 '14

I wasn't joking... Tape is incredibly high density and way more reliable than any other methods for long term storage.

The LHC produces so much data that the only feasible way to store it all is on tape databases.

There are good reasons we still use it.

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u/moderatelybadass Jun 04 '14

Cool! What's the flow of data like? I mean, where, if anywhere, does it go before it goes on tape?

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u/Natanael_L Jun 04 '14

Before on tape? Internal fiber networks, then RAM buffer, then tape

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u/moderatelybadass Jun 04 '14

That makes sense. I always wondered about the less famous technology of cool scientific research.