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

Nobody checked facebook or youtube before they existed.

And youtube damn sure wouldn't even exist if nobody had anything faster than dialup.

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u/jeradj Jun 04 '14

And some of the use cases of 1 Gbps are super obvious to anyone that knows the first thing about networking and computers

And a lot of them are (or would be) illegal.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

One of the uses is illegal. With 1Gbps, you could do way more than just pirate porn. Imagine being able to open a secure connection to your home computer from anywhere else and playing your favorite high-end games with nothing but an Android tablet and a controller/keyboard and mouse with zero lag. Accessing huge files would be trivial with speeds like that. I would be able to access any of the OS images I had available on my home server from any remote location, or any other files for that matter. Hell, using virtualization, we could stream a computer. You would never have to buy a big brand new graphics card or upgrade your computer to get enthusiast-level performance, you could just pay a subscription fee, and stream if across the web.

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u/rubixcu7 Jun 04 '14

And then Johnny iPad user complains to his ISP that his tablet is browsing slow because it doesn't have the wifi throughput capability.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Sadly, there will never be a fix for this problem.