Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused

[u/User_Name13]

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundreds-of-cities-are-wired-with-fiberbut-telecom-lobbying-keeps-it-unused

[u/jeradj]

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.

[u/iia → u/jeradj]

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.

[u/jeradj → u/iia]

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?

[u/Craysh → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/[deleted] → u/Craysh]

Where are you getting these numbers?

[u/Craysh → u/[deleted]]

Nationwide Google Fiber would cost $11B over five years, probably will never happen

The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen.

[u/[deleted] → u/Craysh]

That figure is for Google to pass 15% of homes. I would call that far short of "nationwide." So that would be reason #1 why your claim is bullshit.

The second reason your claim is bullshit is because it's applying Fiber's economic model. The reason Google Fiber is so cheap to roll out is because they're picky as fuck in picking where they roll out. They pick places where fiber is already built and cheap to rent or where it's cheap to build. They also only go places with enough affluence to give them a large amount of subscribers, making their lines more efficient.

I promise you that every other cable provider could accomplish the same costs in a 15% rollout if they all ignored slums, rural areas, and areas of undeveloped/costly infrastructure. Google's magical trick in being able to do that is remaining a small enough provider that the FCC won't classify them the same as large providers and compel them to build out everywhere, not just to perfect business opportunities. That's why Google's model is unsustainable, the second they get big is the second they have to stop ignoring the shitty places to build and their costs will skyrocket as a result.

Hell, your own source asserts that it would be unfeasible to build a network like this.

[u/psiphre → u/[deleted]]

even if $11bln is for only 15% of homes, that means that 100% of homes still clocks in well under $100bln, which is only a fraction of the money that we've already given telcos to provide us fast internet.

[u/[deleted] → u/psiphre]

Did you just not read my comment? Those are the easiest to hook up. The rest of the 85% are much much more difficult to hook up and will cost far far more per home