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Fiber Optics Lines Can Offer Much More
XEpsilon writes: "According to this article, the current usage of fiber optics lines is only .5% of the capacity fiber optics lines offer. The internet is also slowed down by old copper lines that are still being used -- converting from light impulses to electric signals is the major slow-down. A certain company, Cogent Communications, is offering unshared 100Mbps internet access for $1000, which is $500 less than the price of a T1." Interesting to note that Cogent bought just two strands of pre-existing inter-city fiber to re-sell the bandwidth. I'd easily pay $100 a month for far less than a tenth of the bandwidth they're promising -- let's hear it for economies of scale!
Superior technology doesn't make a standard. One just needs to look at the windows install base to see that. Consider dtv will require at least a 600megahertz, this alone means everyone will have to updgrade their system. What's that, the closed source dtv software uses up 60% of your system's memory, prepare to buy more memory.
consider this instead. adsl driver included in the linux kernel to be distributed with all cheap linux boxes. Freenet nodes housing gigabytes of divX+ programming along with a freenet client built inside your mozilla browser. your tivo(tm) style freenet content listing guide will pop up in a separte browser window and when you click on the link, it'll launch the divX+ plugin to play the mulitmedia within your mozilla browser.
don't through intel out of the picture yet folks, the cost of a digital telivision expierence will be cheap, and you can use low end intel commodity parts to build the future divX/freenet/mozilla telivsions. Yes we will be watching television on our telivsions, but it's not going to be dtv technology.
but I'm wondering how long before people in out of the way places will be able to get fast internet access instead of having to rely on ISDN/modem.
Careful... your 50% brain usage could also be due to inferior genes...
:)=
HSJ$$*&#^!#+++ATH0
NO CARRIER
I live in a residential area of a city of about 80,000 and I've got fibre within 100 meters. Shaw cable put fibre through our city for their @home service. Thing is, there's no fibre going in or out of the city, so my data goes from my cable line, to fibre, to the @home CO, then onto T1 lines and such. S'posed to get fibre running in/out of the city within 4 months, though.
-kidlinux.
100mbits/sec to the backbone is nice. I could see a vastly profitable market for coloc data centers. With a monthly operating capital of around $100K, and charging $500/month for 40-50GB of transfer a month (some places I've seen charge thousands for rates of transfer that aren't even a tenth of that), building to a median of about 350 clients you could hit break-even after about 8 months and become fully profitable in just under a year. And still have spare capacity.
Again, the problem is, what's Cogent's peering setup look like? Without multiple, fairly fast peerings (at least OC3, if not more high capacity fiber links), anything that's NOT on the Cogent backbone could choke heavily at the gateway.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Could you provide a link to them?
I'm moving in a couple months here and I'm looking for decent places with high speed access around the Chicagoland area.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The fact that a line is marked as "T1" is more likely to mean that it has the same capacity as a T1 line. It is probably converted to fiber within the network.
If you're in on of the top 25 Metropolitan Areas in N.A., you might have a fiber line within a mile or so. Outside there, well, if you've got one within 10 miles, consider yourself lucky.
I think your assumption is wrong. I live in Bowling Green, OH. No where near a top 25 metro area. We have fiber running in town here. I also know that in Clarks Summit, PA we have fiber running along the railroad tracks behind our house... These are two VERY small towns that have direct access to large data pipes. I am not saying that we are able to access it (in BG we are, I know that they were talking about some ISP's getting a portion of the fiber) but it is none-the-less there and could be readily available.
- Bill
Yeah, but that's outgoing traffic, and I'm guessing it means "going outside the University network", not just other machines on campus. Why would you need to serve RedHat to the world at large from your dorm room?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Well yeah, but there will be some progress made in more efficient propagation of light through the fiber.
splicing and terminating fiber a cheap after a certain point; how am I as an individual to replace the SC connector the puppy just ate off my 1/4 mile of fiber to my home? The connector is about $5, but the tools to apply the connector are over $500.
Houston. There's quite a few of them.
The copper bosses killed you, Joe. 'I never died', said he.
21st Century is wiring Chicago with fiber to the house. They provide cable, local phone service, and internet access. I could even get it right now. Unfortunately their local phone service sucks, I don't want cable, and their internet backbone is somewhat spotty... If only we (the people) owned the fiber and any provider could use it. Then we might get some better options.
What irks me about all this is that even more then 5 years ago im sure telcos saw the need for a data net. But, in classic form, they continued to milk the current infrastructure to death instead of doing something like this [fiber data only net]. Of course they WILL switch over, but, they will find a crafty way to charge you more, and give ytou the same crappy service... and who knows how long the pipes will be bursting for before they do it. Heck, they might just wait for startups to build it and buy it all up.
This article is heartning and pisses me off at the same time. I SHOULD have this innovation in my house right now. Oh well. Hopefully these guys get a TON of business and make all the T1 installations obsolete, before the telcos know what hit them.
My future net:
All fiber data net spanning the globe, with lines to every house
Voice is done over data lines, with higher quality, and less cost.
There is more bandwidth then anyone knows what do do with, thus allowing 'cable' television, video phones, and more, to utilize the network.
This future is not technically unfeasable. Everything exists to make it reality, except for backward thinking bean-counters at major corperations who currently control the net stifling rapid forward progress.
Hopefully, operations such as this startup will accelerate the goal. Can only hope.
"Stuff... In my home!? NEVER!" - Zim on Invader Zim
"I want the toilet seat!" - Little Dog on Two Stupid Dogs
to anyone, after all, I'm 65 feet from the fibre for Qwest, ICG, and Sprint, where I live (they all run along my side of the street), but call any of them and ask about getting a connection, and you need a T1, w/ a local-loop installed (by the LEC, ie. Qwest) and so on. Thing is, while I technically understand, it's not easy to just 'patch' into fibre, unless you were meant to patch in there. I'd still love to see someone who had the setup, so in major areas (I'm in the denver tech center, so there's certainly a lot of buildings around that could use not HAVING to have the LEC install a local-loop), that I _could_ get fibre into my house without Qwest being involved.
...I'm much more familiar with the Telco's infrastructure, where they've been busily replacing long-distance trunks with fiber for quite some time.
A silly question, though: Are DS3 lines necessarily copper? I was under the impression (possibly wrong) that they could be either copper or fiber, depending on the local equipment.
Oh, and UUNET doesn't own 50%. More line 30% (in the USA). Sprint, MCI (now Cable&Wireless), ATT, and BBN (now Verizon) are now the "big 5" in the US - they each run between 10 and 25% of the network. And in Europe, the national telephone monopolies own huge percentages of the local backbones. I'd estimate that no company owns more than 10% of the total world-wide Internet backbone capacity.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
Once there was UUNET, and MCI.
Then Worldcomm bought UUNET.
Then Worldcomm bought MCI.
However, as part of the deal to buy MCI, Worldcomm had to sell the Internet backbone and ISP side of MCI to a third party. It ended up with Britain's Cable and Wireless.
So: Worldcom/MCI now has UUNET's ISP business, while the old MCI ISP is sitting with C&W.
Confusing, eh?
Just remember that GTE bought BBN, and Bell Atlantic bought Nynex (which had bought New England Telephone), and now B.A. and GTE have merged, but they've spun off the ISP stuff as Verizon. And of course Qwest now owns USWest, while SBC owns Pac Bell, Ameritec, SWBell, Prodigy, and CellularOne. And of course AT&T has spun off Lucent now. About the only people I think that are still intact and haven't bought (or been bought) by another large player is Sprint.
I loooooovvvvve the Telecommunications Act of 1996, don't you?
;-)
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
The normal ratio of commerical over commit is 10:1 not 200:1
"Now, I hope and pray that I will, but, today I am still just a bill"
Now I hope and pray that I will But today I am still, just a bill
Unlimited bandwidth...until now piracy has only been limited by the amount of resources available, not anymore. Look at a cable user's mp3 collection compared to the guy with a 56k. When bandwith expands in the near future to make movies download like mp3s today, ALL intellectual property will be in danger. The government and others would like to think people have respect for intellectual property but they do not. Look at napster, look at the bandwidth coming; its going to happen. The internet is here, now what can we download for free?
> all traffic coming from one network would be
...
> *easy* to stop.
agreed - but individual hosts on a cable modem typically have a 128 kbps on shared bandwidth.
100 Mbps of dedicated bandwidth could devastate lots of targets at once - the term MIRV comes to mind.
so if you have a distributed attack from lots of these hosts
.
If you can't hack it in this reality what makes you think you'll be any better off in the next?
Try the Phoenix metro area. Seems almost every decent complex around here has at least a T1 (Ether ports in the apartment. Weeee).
To misquote Churchill, never has an operating system (FreeBSD) used by so many been administered by so few. - NetCraft
What do you mean "Verizon" ? MediaOne is now AT&T but I don't think Verizon comes into it. BA (Bell Atlantic/Bad Attitude) is now Verizon.
Uh, moderate this guy up to 6 ? Hello?
ok, say who! ?
What Cogent likely will be offering initially is very high speed VPN service to _businesses_ which lease space in relatively few buildings in each of some major cities. These will be fast _internal_ networks. Who needs this? Big corporations: think banks, brokerages, large accounting firms, major industrial corporations. Another poster noted that the first turn-up in the Chicago area will be at the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE) - it is a _very_ high volume financial marketplace. These will be Cogent's customers.
The really large firms (IBM, GM/EDS/Hughes, maybe CSC) already did this years ago, but have since subleased and/or sold their internal networks (IBM GlobalNet is now owned by AT&T, for example). Now they're free to hitch onto faster, newer networks such as the ones Cogent and others are building.
The point is, this is about high speed _private_ nets, not fiber-to-the-curb or replacing xDSL and cable. Sure, there will be peering, but that will depend on the speed of those interfaces - the real speed advantages will obtain within their network.
A single span without amplification can currently reach about 30 km at 40 Gbps in the lab. When you add optical amplification, things start to get rather better, and transatlantic single span fibres have existed for a few years now. Couple this with the fact that a single optical amplifier can amplify over 100 40 Gbps channels at once when WDM (wavelength division multiplexing) is used, and you have quite ridiculous data rates.
.5% of the available bandwidth being used is for short span WDM systems, without optical amplifiers.
I imagine the comment in the article about only
Currently Nortel Networks has a 160 wavelength 10 Gbs system. I don't know what the competion has, I am only familiar with what I have used. I doubt that they have sold one yet that uses all the wavelengths.
Lucent,Alcatel, and Nortel should have 40 Gbs systems out in the next year or so. This does not necessarily mean that it will run at 160 x 40 Gbs, I actually highly doubt that will happen. Maybe 40 or so at first.
This stuff just doesn't scale up any more is the problem. 10 Gbs will only work on 60% or so of installed fiber spans today and 40 Gbs is like 25% or so.
Its fairly easy to make conservative engineering arguemnts in the case where the physics isn't well understood. This is the problem here.
As I said you can buy today a 160 wavelength 10 Gig system, but I doubt they have sold any.
I'm biased too, I am working on solving phase problems with high speed systems and I think it's a bloody hard problem.
Is that porn is why the cost of bandwidth is falling so precipitously.
Porn brings millions of users to the internet, which increases economies of scale, which drops the costs for everyone.
In the computer industry, games drive CPU developement, and porn drives bandwidth. If you don't like it, then don't follow the porn links.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
According to a book I own, fiber optics can go about tens of kilometers long. So probably more than 10 kilometers, but less than a hundred.
move.
Same problem here. Attempting to do a bit of market research on this company. They do not appear to be public yet...
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
I have posted about MFNX quite a few times in the :(
past 18 months, but nobody seemed interested
You can find info about them here
Metro is primarily in the business of leasing
dark fiber in the local loop, but they will also
provide the services to light it, as well as
long haul connections. While not economical
for the individual, for businesses this is the
way to go.
disclaimer - i do own their stock
Not to mention if you switch to digital lines in your house/apartment, you'll lose the benifit of the phone compay supplying the power for the phone. They haven't found a way to send power through a digital line, so if your power goes out, so does your phone. Besides, with DSL technology, why upgrade? I am happy as long as they connect to my appartment with the good old standard copper wire.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
bandwidth triples yearly through 2020?
The article says that the new company is a startup founded by a person with a different name than the founder of the current Cogen Comm. That's why I don't think they're the same company.
I would like to know the provider. Verio had a special a while back for a Full T1 at the "great" price of $1000/month. One problem, Verio blows.
I just signed up with UU, and am paying around $1500/mo. I could get a cheaper connection, but you have to understand QoS ismuch more important than price when it comes right down to it for most companies with a reasonable cashflow.
But, let's say I run a small-ish company with, say, 3 locations in office buildings in major cities- let's say NYC, SF, and Atlanta. At each location I have, say, 300 employees. For 3k a month I can now connect all my locations with a very high speed WAN, since they are all on the "same" backbone (and probably running some sort of VPN on top of this backbone to minimize the effect of connecting your lans over a public backbone), and I have all the bandwidth I need for running public internet servers to boot. Sounds like a good deal to me. =)
Yes there is. Just take a look at a chart of bandwidth price versus time(just like CPU price versus time for Moore's law) and you'll see that the exact same trend, except the slope is about 2-3 times that of Moore's law for CPU's. That means that the price of bandwidth is halving at twice the rate that cpu prices are halving, or, taken another way, bandwidth is doubling at twice the rate that CPU's are doubling.
Now I'm not talking about how much you can get a T1 from your local Telco, I'm talking about how much it actually costs to deploy a network given current tech.
-----
"People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them"
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
I've tried looking for Cogent's web site, but couldn't find it. There seem to be a coupla companies with the name Cogent out there, but not the one that does this fiber stuff... Does anyone have a URL?
i am also a UT student, but dont live in the dorms (but the cable internet is nice here). The reason they dont block napster though, is once you hit 3Gbit outgoing traffic for the week, they shut off your port until whatever day they reset the counters.
Data only? 100 Mbps? Sounds like I'll have to start using DialPad.
Stop being hypocritical. I can think of few things that are a bigger waste of bandwidth than your above post (pokemon, btw, being one of them) Why you got moderated to 3, I don't know. My qualm is not with your views that pornography and pokemon are evil; those are just what they are - your views. My qualm is that you would be one of the first people flaming anything slashdot called 'putting down free speech' when you yourself are 'putting down free speech' by calling for a national moratorium on porn, and get modded up. In essence, you're a whore. Karma whore. Mod her down. It's not funny.
You mean 1.6 Mbit?
At my school, they actually have all the 100Mbps switches toggled down to 10Mbps to prevent burying the internet link.
If they could get a few 100Mbps links, that'd make life a lot easier for the peeps in the server room.
================
================
Microsoft is not the answer, Microsoft is the question. The answer is "no".
You say "If you're in on of the top 25 Metropolitan Areas in N.A., you might have a fiber line within a mile or so. Outside there, well, if you've got one within 10 miles, consider yourself lucky." Yeah, that's nice. I have fiber *physically in my house* from a no-longer-in-service T1, and I *still* can't get any reasonable and affordable service. So, just having fiber nearby does not make one lucky. I wish...
What!!! I'm not paying that!!! Common K-Tel Gigabit TokenRing for $49.95 is where it's at!
Seriously what good is 100Mb (unshared) gonna give you when the rest of the internet is bottle-necked in the first place? If you have good evidence against this statement please let me know.
"Survival of the fittest Max, and we've got the fucking gun!" - Pi
It is not enough merely to be a Superior Mutant, for in the end times the hand of one OverMan may be raised against another, and he who lives by the Word of "Bob" may yet DIE by the Word of "Bob."
$1500 for a T1?! You're gnuts! I get mine for $750.
Connah
Connah
"Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for this change to take effect."
The big difference is that these guys are offering TV and cheap long distance on their wire as well. I can't wait for them to get to my building!
Actually, it's 10%... Of course with my superior genes, it's closer to 50% :)
I'm so sorry to hear that you have only 20% of the brain capacity that everyone else has. Poor kid. It must be tough to only use 10% of the 20% you had from the start.
Something similar has been done in other places for one implementation check out:
/ profiles/mimos_cp.htm
;) ).
;).
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/rt/12000
The interesting part is where you use dark fibre and use cisco's packet over SONET and forget about tons of SDH equipment. This can make things significantly less expensive (I can't bring myself to say cheaper
In Cogent's case they probably would still use WDM sort of stuff because 2.5 Gbps per fibre is rather measly for USA
Cheerio,
Link.
Fiber Optics Lines Can Offer Much More
No shit!
It won't go faster than itself but I imagine they'd be using a greater spectrum of light to cram more data through a fibre strand.
There's a few of them in the Raleigh-Durham area. They're advertised on the radio all the time.
I find it shocking to see that you're lucky in the US to be within such great distances to the fibre-based network.
;-)
Even in living in Bolton (UK), with a population of only 270,000 (meagre given the size of the places you are talking about), outside of the town centre we still have fibre from 3 telecomms providers running beside the pavement next to our building - which isn't in a location renound for its technological advantages, belive me. I find it pretty whacky that these people would advertise a service that they couldn't possibly provide without a lot of disruption.
I would tend to agree on the 'data optimized' point though. When you're talking about the speeds that fibre can go at, any sort of optimization claim is pretty redundant in my book
Not as clear cut as that. This assumes the universe is a closed system, which isn't neccesarily true. If we could open a "portal" to some alternate reality, and import hydrogen from there for a lower energy cost than the energy liberated by using that fuel in a fusion reactor, then we could add energy to the universe. And that's just ONE possible trick.
Still, I wouldn't mind it if Ontario Hydro started running a few tokamaks, just as long as they were nowhere near me :)
Why not near you? They're not particularly dangerous. Hell, fision power plants are pretty damn safe (relativly so--nothing is completly safe). The downside is the waste, and that's the sort of problem which can come to you where ever you are.
Might actually make Electric cars feasable, and I can stop paying that whopping $26 every two weeks for gas!
It's not the cost of electricity that makes electric cars unfeasible. As a matter of fact, they are arguably already feasible. The problem with them is the cost and ineficiencies of fuel cell technology. Cheap electricity won't change the cost of buying one, only running one, and they're already cheap to run.
This company cogent, where can i get in touch with them? i went to www.cogent.com but i don't think that is them, i WANT there services, where is a point of contact?
brainchild out
Well, splicing is time-consuming. But really cheap. (I spent a year of my life building fibre networks, and spent innumerable hours sitting with a bunch of guys splicing fibres....)
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Cogent has a bunch of positives to their service. First, they own the network between the sites that they plan on lighting up. The fiber has been purchased; the backbone routers are in place, as of Oct 15. The FIRST building to get lit is 440 S LaSalle, in Chicago, the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (actually the office tower behind it). This is scheduled to happen November 1st, and if so then I will be getting a very fun phone call that day, asking if I still wish to go online with them.
However, what the majority of you are missing is this - if I buy links in other buildings across the nation, I now have an incredibly cheap WAN, at 100 mbs. Cisco all throughout, so VPN becomes that much easier. A dedicated point to point from Chicago to San Fran is easily 1-2k a month, even from a discount carrier such as Qwest. Also, Cogent explicitly states in its literature that they don't plan on providing access for everyone - just for the companies in the buildings they light up. That boils down to only major metros, and buildings where fiber already has been run, so as to reduce fees for Cogent.
I'm sold on the service. I've alreayd signed up 4 buildings. Here's to hoping they pull it off.
-Hello Slashdot, I'm a first time poster.
Yeah, I know. It sucks pretty bad, but I only went over 3.5 Gb once, before the limit was instituted.
this is a little off topic but why cant have publicly (as in you me and our neighbors) built networks. Like where everyone spends eight hours a week laying fibre where it needs to go so we dont have to wait for all those bandwidth nazis, who wont be running fibre directly into my house for a while. Hell I would be willing to use my entire vacation for the chance to get fibre into my house. Am I just crazy or does this sound like a good idea to any one else
lose != loose
Hmmmmm....PrOn
*shouts* "ok boys brining that fiber right in here to my PC"
sorry I had to, dear god let the moderators be nice to me and my Karma
amen
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
Maybe. In some areas, you can get a full T1 feed (with a class C, no less) for $900/mo, and $0-$2000 setup.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Reply if I am wrong here and it may have been said already but 0.5% had nothing to do with moores law and the max flow of data over a fiber optic connection. What they were saying is that 0.5% of the actual line is used (i.e. if there are 1000 individual strings of fiber in a line 5 of them are used). I may be wrong here. "42"
Remove *your pants* to send me email.
Want to bet? Bearing in mind how fast the web is growing, do you really believe this?
Actually its well established that the actual data rate travelling in the middle of the network has been doubling every NINE MONTHS for a couple of decades. Read Tanenbaum's book on networking for more info.
You mentioned the problems of increasing throughput. The current maximum achieved throughput isn't much to do with it- current installations are typically one or two orders of magnitude slower than the maximum.
The maximum achieved looks like it is reaching a limit, but the installations are years behind this and anyway doubtless new techniques will be invented to circumvent the limits we see right now.
Even then there's still an astonishing amount of bandwidth left. However it's nigh on impossible to access this bandwidth due to phase dispersion of fibers. I suspect that techniques will be developed to overcome this.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"If fiber capacity utilization doubles every year, then we have 8 years to go from .5% capacity to 128% of capacity.
George Bush would call this fuzzy math.
Don't bet the farm on this one.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
If I made $1000 a month I would go without eating for fiber. I would live in a crawl space of a Sky Scraper for that. My hometown (Rural - Hayward, MN) is an area not yet introduced to DSL or cable modems.
-- http://www.safeproxy.org - Free Anonymous Web Surfing
@Home tries to compensate for this by employing proxy servers and caching web pages for the users so that popular ones are 'closer'. This works so swell that I invariably bypass the proxy server so that the damned thing won't slow me down.
straight to the brainstem please
(2,3-Benzopyrrole)
rather than paying that much for bandwidth I would rather just stay in my dorm with my flat 50 bucks a semester internet fee and get 10mbit+ a sec =]
Here in MN the Body Ventura is offering, (and I'm not sure on the specifics) incentives for companies to bring high speed access to farm country to give farmers the advantage of "ecommerce" as he put it. So if that plan proves successful it may start in other areas as well.
You don't share your 100Mbps of optical ring with anyone else......
I love it when people manage to turn a limitation on their equipment into an advantage...
Unfortunately you do have to share the bandwith when you and your 23 other 100Mbps users
try to fit your 2.4Gbps over the 1Gbps link to the router which is servicing the ring....
And you have to share the backbone bandwidth.
Sounds like fraudulent advertizing to me....
You can see for yourself by looking at the Cisco customer profile of Cogent Communications
Take a look at the figure at the bottom of the page for the juicy details....
-jon
(d) The reason FO has not penetrated to the "last mile" (i.e. a fibre each into each home) is because the cost of fibre modems are prohibitively expensive. (Unlikes copper network, which works off electricity, FO works off light, which means a fast-repeating laser at both ends, which means pricey electronics.)
No its not that fiber modems are prohibitively expensive, its that splicing fiber is very time consuming, time==money.
It is much cheaper to bring fiber near you and use copper the last ~1000 than to bring you fiber.
The other problem with fiber to the home (FTTH) is that it takes much less power to run the copper modem than the fiber modem.
Which is a big deal if you are also trying to provide 'lifeline' voice over the same link.
-jon
Of course, that is what they want us to believe....
Actually, there is something kinda like this out now. Sprint Broadband Direct has a service to 'beam' the internet over radio waves from a tower to your house via a small 13.5" square antenna from up to 35 miles away. My parents just ordered it (they live in Tucson). Their neighbors already have it and love it. I'm not sure where else it is available... but it *is* out there.
--
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
As for peering, i dunno, aren't only the public peering points congested? I thought the private ones were pretty well handled. The problem is with carriers trying to dump packets off to another carrier as soon as they can. But if cogent builds another network, that'll still relieve some of the network congestion...
IMHO, vendors like Microsoft, Sun, etc. should be addressing this problem, but it seems like they don't care.
And this is only UUNET (the biggest backbone provider in the world)... don't they own like 50% of the world's backbones?
Notice the abundance of T3's and a few T1's serving as backbones.
Slightly off topic, but i was wondering, the fastest backbone speed so far is OC-192 which is 10 gigabits/sec in speed. However, i've heard of DWDM (Dense Wave Division Multiplexing) which supposedly gives 10 Gigabits/sec PER STRAND of fiber... how come we don't have any backbones using this technology?
They most likely have to pay for peering with the big boys (i.e. UUnet, sprint, verio, etc.). The question is, how many peering points do they have with them? Their service would be absolutely useless if they could only connect to the public peering points.
Actually, it's 10%... Of course with my superior genes, it's closer to 50% :)
.5%
"Originally, the internet served a specific purpose of allowing academics to communicate and further the development of social and scientific knowledge."
Um....No. Originally the Internet was created by the US government as a means of maintaining communication lines between cities in the event of a nuclear war. Conceived in the early '60s, and the first link was built around '68. Yes, they were using TCP/IP, too. Perhaps you're referring to ARPAnet, which has been obsolete for a very long time.
Besides that, where do you get off saying that porn is the death of society? It is a means of expression. No more. It has been around since the dark ages, probably longer. (Archaeologists in England have dug up some "pornographic" sketches and engravings dating to about 900AD. Even "Punch" was mildly pornographic in the 1300's.) Now, if Porn were the root of the death of Civilization, then why, oh why great godess of knowledge did the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods of our history happen? (Not to mention the whole Rennaissance itself!)
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Infinite power is impossible. The Universe has a finite amount of Energy, and if I remember 11th grade Physics: "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed."
:). Might actually make Electric cars feasable, and I can stop paying that whopping $26 every two weeks for gas!
Still, I wouldn't mind it if Ontario Hydro started running a few tokamaks, just as long as they were nowhere near me
I'm looking forward to seeing my tank of gas hit $50, because that means that the f$cking Minivans and SUV's will have a $150 tank of gas every week and people will stop driving the damn things!
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
And then there's Reflex Communications whose purpose is to give broadband access to communities that aren't able to connect via cable or telco DSL. The price is very reasonable also.
Of course, and I highly suspect it, I may be talking out of my ass. -oqti
Finally, a google.com search turned this up: www.cogentco.com. Bingo.
Just thought it was odd that the site wasn't mentioned anywhere here.
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
Is this sort of like how we only use 5% of our brain power?
: |)
Fiber optic lamps are on sale at Shopko for $19.95, that's where I got mine. It has a little light thing inside that makes the fibers change colors. It's cool.
: |)
"According to this article, the current usage of fiber optics lamps is only .5% of the light output fiber lamps offer. The new high-tech lamps are also slowed down by old light bulb that are still being used -- the hesitancy to convert from classic shade lamps to classy high-tech fiber optic lamps is the major slow-down. A certain company, FiberLamps Inc., is offering unshared Super Fiber-Optic lamp, which is $5 less than the price of a standard shade lamp." Interesting to note that FiberLamps bought just two strands of pre-existing inter-city fiber to re-sell the new lamps. I'd easily pay $100 for one of these sexy new lamps! They're promising -- let's hear it for Fiber Optic Lamps!
The nice idee about fiber optics lines is that the capacity can be higher than 100Mbps. The problem is that not a lot of places have fiber optics lines. The major slow-down from light to Digital signal should not be aby problem on the moment as we have IC's than can work with Light and can directly use this signal as would it be a electronic signal. I Hope in the next upcomming years we gone see more off these line's comming in our home to use it for TV, Tel. and Internet. As the speed is no limitation on a fiber optics line ;-)
-=[ MivaBe ]=-
Pffft... I can already sign up for the 8mbps (yeah you heard me) Sprint ION service today for 119 a month. And that includes 2 local phone lines, a free "hub" (really a dsl modem and 2 ethernet cards in a box), and 400 minutes a month of domestic long distance. The world will never need more than 8mbps! (wow, that sounds a lot like Bill Gates). Of course, I can't afford 119 a month so I'm just getting the 1.5mbps plan. 100mbps would be cool though, download 10 dvd streams in real time... and that's with minimum compression... that's like 100 mpeg-4 streams in real time. The possibilities are endless.
this fact was also noted in an old book called 'the hacker crackdown', where fiber optic wire was referred to as 'dark wire', because there was so little data being transmitted through it compared to its capacity.
They aren't going to have an annoying catch-phrase like that one company's "Ride the light" or something like that?
But seriously,
I really hope we start switching over to fiber and stuff, it would really speed up the internet, even on a modem.
BTW, does anyone know the length a fiber-optic cable can go? I know they use them on Telephone lines, so it must be pretty far, wouldn't kick a$$ to have a direct fiber line into you home from an OC-128?
As with other areas of the economy, especially energy management as it affects the environment, the focus is misguided on production rather than more efficient use. There's plenty of bandwidth to go around already, but it's being improperly allocated. Just think for a second about the sheer vollume of Pokemon and porn that's saturating the existing pipes, and you'll know what I'm talking about. Originally, the internet served a specific purpose of allowing academics to communicate and further the development of social and scientific knowledge. Today, it just lets people get their prurient fix or their yahoo quotes. Laying more fiber will perhaps further the science of fiber-laying, but the same can be said of all sorts of other make-work endeavors.
What I'm trying to get at is a call for a national moratorium on porn and other wasteful bandwidth. It'd do wonders for internet congestion and it'd help us as a society in the process.
-- Anne Marie
Em i get my internet for "free" with about a 300k max speed to the outside for living in the dorms at CMU. In exchange for that i pay $550 a month for housing which i could get off campus for about $250-300. So the implied cost of my bandwidth is $250-300 a month. For that me and 4 of my friends could split a 100mbit line and get much higher speeds for the same price... "There is no such thing as a free internet connect"
i would love wireless in my house...
http://www.ariseweb.com - For the geek in all of us.
As A network architect for a large internet backbone, I can tell you one thing about this. It looks good on paper. It sounds good in the press. It makes your stock prices go up. But it doesn't move your traffic any quicker. The truth of the matter is, the people who this product is targeted at are the same people who are paying 1500 a month for a T1 that they use 1/10 of for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. Ok.. So now CogentCO is going to go in to major cities and wire all the buildings.. oh.. I dunno.. lets say.. LA for example. In 1 square mile of downtown LA they could possibly pick up .. oh.. I dunno.. lets say 3000 customers, all getting 100 megs of traffic.
Since none of the sites these folks are trying to get to are located on the Cogent network, the traffic is going to have to go somewhere.
The majority is going to go to UUnet, Sprint, Exodus, and Abovenet. How much traffic was that for LA again?? Oh yeah.. 3000 x 100mb.. 300,000 mb. WHAT??!!! C'mon.. I know you can't really push 100mb across 100baseT.. And I know they aren;t going to have 3000 customers there.. but if just one customer users their full pipe, they have 100 meg of traffic destined for other networks. 10 customers? 1000 meg. The exchange points get busy.
Maybe they can haul these thousands of megs of traffic back and forth across their OC192 backbone all day long. Fine. Wait til they try to give that traffic away. Thats where your bottle neck comes in. Theres only one way to stop this and to create the INTERNET of the Future. The one we dream about. Everything on demand. Right at your fingertips. No delay. Speed of light baby.
It has to be 1 network. None of this exchange point stuff. I know this isnt a very popular opinion.. but its true. If we continue to design and build many different networks and tie them together with different technologiesl, we're never going to get it right. Oh.. damn.. can't do that. Justice department won't let us. So live with it. It's going to get a lot worse.
I know for a fact that Cogent is having issues even getting public peering. So they have to buy transit. Even if they get a record breaking 100 dollars a meg transit deal, they can't make money. This is going to be interesting. Oh what a tangled web we weave. Lets look at this pricing model. Unoversubscribed 100meg per customer. OC192 backbone, about 10000 megs. 10GB's. That's alot isn't it? Oh wait.. 10000mb/100mb= 100 customers? 100 customers * $1000 a month? 100,000 a month revenue? How were they paying for that OC192? Unless its free, someone lying about something.. hell, lets say they get total free peering in each city. Now they can do 100 customers in each city. Doesn't work. How are they going to pay for it? oversubscription.
- a high-end user's connection speed grows by 50% per year
- you don't get to use this added bandwidth to make your Web pages larger until 2003
If you don't know who he is see hisFree as in "the Truth shall set you..."
If other places have connections within 10 miles, obviously someone nears to be near those cables.
*sigh* OK, maybe for the last time, repeat after me: "The bottleneck is not the speed of transmission. The bottleneck is the speed of modulation."
Even if everyone in the world is using modems based on J.S. Bell's theorem (letting, in theory, communications to travel instantantously [and yes, I realize the theorem is still controversial, but that's not the pint]), we would still be limited by how fast we can interpret the data on the two ends. I think the max speed for fiber is something like 50-60GB/sec.
Windows 2000: Designed for the Internet. The Internet: Designed for UNIX.
With CATV/Fiber Hybrid networks from AT&T and Time Warner, wheres that last mile problem again?
-- dieman - Scott Dier
Anyone feel like looking up how much data two strands of fibre can handle?
The gain-bandwidth product of the erbium lasers used for repeaters is something like 1.0e11, if I remember correctly (could be way off on this). This gives a practical limit of between 1.0e11 and 1.0e12 bps without materials improvements.
The theoretical bandwidth limit for optical carriers of any kind is the frequency of the carrier itself - somewhere in the realm of 5.0e14 Hz (for visible-light carriers). This gives a maximum theoretical data rate somewhere between 5.0e14 and (roughly) 3.0e15 bps, depending on how much power you want to dump in and how much noise is present.
Yes, but an attack that is *easy* to stop. The offending network provider would simply have his traffic filtered by his peers, as the source of the offending traffic.
And where is it that cable hosts typically have 128kbps? I have several times that, as do many I have met... and what is shared bandwidth? The internet is packet switched.....
What's that supposed to mean, exactly?
100Mbps back to their private network, then out to wherever? What real good is '100Mbps unshared' access to the internet, when the gateway is only a few hundred megabit at most? "Yes, we have a hundred customers on 100Mbps dedicated bandwidth".
I know I'm nit picking.... it's just that somehow, 'unshared' and 'shared' have become buzzwords. For Christ sakes. It's a packet switched medium in the first place!
Not a big gun at all.
The important part about DDoS is the first big D, standing for 'Distributed'.
All traffic coming from one network would be *easy* to stop.
It's when it's coming from everywhere that it's an effective attack;
Can you imagine if a powerful host on 100Mbps was compromised - how big of a gun that would be for DDos? If you're driving a big truck, you have to obtain a commercial driver's license.
The ISP should not issue 100 Mbps connections to anyone not running a seriously hardened firewall.
They should bundle one in - or have the site sign off that they have a serious solution deployed.
.
Cogent Communications
Is this really worth it? I have a Mediaone (err, I mean roadrunner, I mean AT&T, I mean Verizon) cable modem and my downloads max at around 200kbyte/s. However, I hardly ever sustain 200k/s downloads, most of the time I'm around a quarter of that or less. At some point doesn't the bottleneck stop being your connection and start being the Internet as a whole? Isn't there a better solution?
- tred
I've been day-dreaming about bandwidth ever since I received a letter from the city of Palo Alto that I could participate in a trail, called Fiber To The Home.
Can you imagine receiving a letter which says you can get a 100Mbit/sec Fiber link straight to your house for $190,-?
You can read more about it here: http://www.city.palo-alto.ca.us/u til ities/fth/
However unfortunately my area was not selected for the trail, and the project seems to be delayed (what a surprise).
The original article was utterly full of hyperbole, but it's not quite as bad as you make it sound.
By now, the vast majority of telco central offices, even rural ones, have fiber optic connectivity. I think even hapless old VeriZontal/New England Tel has glass to their COs everywhere. BUT it rarely goes any farther. It's the local loop, to the subscriber, that's always copper. Sure, glass loops exist for businesses that require DS3+ (45Mbps) or multiple T1s, but the entry cost is indeed high.
"Fiber to the home" was a big catch phrase a decade ago, but almost dead now. They're trying to make DSL do the job, which it often can't (because the old copper was installed for voice and more often than not can't carry DSL).
But even then, the Cogent analysis is wrong: Telcos will bring you T1 for under $150/mo (from their CO), often much less. Its ISP fees that are higher, charges that are <i>above</i> the loop cost, and ISPs lose money as it is.
To date, I haven't seen much progress. I've only seen one complex that boldly offered high speed Internet as part of the benefits of living there. When I was apartment hunting last Spring, the best I could do was to get (false) assurances that we could get DSL if we moved in -- not as part of the contract, but that the site was presumably ready. (After we moved in to the apartment we selected, we found out we couldn't get DSL after all... but I digress.)
I have also tried to convince my father, who owns a rental property site with lower population density, to consider some high-tech improvements -- to no avail. He barely listens; he's already made up his mind. And from a purely economic perspective, I suppose it makes sense -- he has virtually zero vacancies and regular payments, so he doesn't "need" to offer more. I would even say he doesn't care all that much about the property, so as long as it provides an income and few enough hassles, he's not going to make any changes.
I look forward to the day -- which may never arrive -- when rental property owners/managers do try hard to cater to technology interests. If you want to see it happen, do some "shopping around" and always ask, "Does high-speed Internet come with the apartment as part of the rental price?" As soon as they say it doesn't, respond "Ok, I'm not interested" and hang up or walk out. Note that you don't have to be really looking for a new place to live, the idea is to get them thinking.
If we don't demonstrate the demand -- i.e., if we don't make the demand for this support -- don't expect to see it anytime soon, if ever.
No Laughing Allowed!
Anyone feel like looking up how much data two strands of fibre can handle?
And for correction's sake: they bought two strands running cross-country (for starters), and another strand elsewhere.
Those two strands across the country, according to the article, are hooked up to Internet-only switches. That means they're not sharing voice or other data, so they can handle huge amounts of theoretical bandwidth (current use is gigabits/sec per strand, and they're claiming we're under half a percent of their possible use).
That would let you sell 100Mb a shot pretty comfortably. Who needs more than two strands of something that carries thousands of copper lines worth of data?
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Within Ontario, Canada, ICS is helping the local Public Utilities companies to set up fibre optic networks to the door of businesses in most cities. The PUCs are laying fibre in the ground all over in those cities (Sudbury, Ottawa, Peterborough, Toronto, London, etc.) and they're able to get you high-speed Internet access where you are with very little effort.
<P>That's what we're using at <a href="http://www.fibrespeed.net">FibreSpeed</a> for our new line of integrated web application services. Gotta love those strands in that metal pipe on the ceiling.</P>
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Within Ontario, Canada, ICS is helping the local Public Utilities companies to set up fibre optic networks to the door of businesses in most cities. The PUCs are laying fibre in the ground all over in those cities (Sudbury, Ottawa, Peterborough, Toronto, London, etc.) and they're able to get you high-speed Internet access where you are with very little effort.
That's what we're using at FibreSpeed for our new line of integrated web application services. Gotta love those strands in that metal pipe on the ceiling.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
There is real copper T1 in the phone networks, out in the last-few-miles side of things, as well as analog voice, though much of that is also carried on fiber loop carrier equipment or voice muxed onto T1s. The wires that have been used for analog phones can often be cranked up for DSL, so carry higher-speed signals on the same old crappy wire, but it's T1 or below, not T3.
The interesting new copper out there isn't backbones, it's cable TV, which typically does hybrid fiber-coax systems - copper coax down your block, fiber networks feeding the copper, and subdividing the networks any time there's enough load to make it worth adding more fiber. On the other hand, there's also a lot of fiber direct to businesses, some of it run by cable TV companies, and some by access providers (including telcos and competitors.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There's already a company called Cogent Communication which was founded in 1981. You'd think that a guy that comes up with startup companies would at least do a search to make sure he's not already using a name in use.
Just a FYI, from what I can tell, Cogent can't deliver what they are marketing. /meg charge. In any case, they will realize (when they start *really* selling) how capitial intensive the business model is, and how little they are bringing in, how expensiver engineers are, and how greedy stock holders can be.
I had heard about them, and wanted to find out more when I was at interop. I have worked with ISPs and especially "last-mile" ISP's long enought to be excited by what they said they could offer. I am also able to ask some insightful questions from the practicial perspective.
In speaking with them and some of thier chief officers, it became clear to me that they are a combination of a nifty business plan and cisco money.
It could work, but at this point in time, their real business is raising capitial. They want to be first with their business model, which, BTW, didn't seem to include peering agreements. IMHO, the $100/month is just theoreticial marketing numbers.
My bet is that they will charge $100/month for circuit, and bill for internet bandwidth usage, or maybe even a reasonable
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
My place of work pays about $800/mo for a full, dedicated T1 from @work. You're crazy if you're paying $1500+.
Pacific Place Center in Vancouver, BC has fiber to the basement and ethernet to the living room... They were a prototype, (about 3-4 years old) so I'm pretty sure that there are a number of other recent developments with similar setups. (I remember about PPC because a few of my friends live there. I'm happy enough with 1.5Mb ADSL for $75/mo.
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
The max capacity of a fiber may be essentially fixed (as other posters pointed out), but most people aren't using that capacity because they can't switch it fast enough. Since switches are made out of ICs, Moore's Law applies to them, giving an increase in the effective bandwidth over time.
Yes, the article is hyperbole written by a media-type who does not understand the technology he/she is writing about.
More facts :
(a) Fibre optics is CHEAPER than copper. Why? Fiber optics is silicon (i.e. sand), copper is metal. Production of fibre is a well-developed process.
(b) Besides, most of the Capital in installing a urban COMMs network is not in cables, but what the industry jargon call "OSP", Outside-plant. Which is just plain old digging up roads, putting in ducts and manholes, and the putting the road back in pristine condition (NOT easy) again.
(c) Secondary cost is building repeater stations for long-haul FO cable trunks.
(d) The reason FO has not penetrated to the "last mile" (i.e. a fibre each into each home) is because the cost of fibre modems are prohibitively expensive. (Unlikes copper network, which works off electricity, FO works off light, which means a fast-repeating laser at both ends, which means pricey electronics.)
(e) One advantage of FO is that it enables implementation of SDH networks, where capacity is shared in a ring instead of wasted in a tree like PDH networks most POTS now run on.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Denser fiber is way cool for more or less local operations (think Video on Demand), but for what I use bandwidth for, there already is plenty to go around and the cables no longer are the bottleneck.
Personally I'm very happy with the personal E1 I have outside of office hours. Every time I tried to assess why I wasn't maxing out the line I found it was because of poor routing (i.e., poor peering on my providers part).
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Data services at prices like this could seriously challange big telephone networks. Why? Even though it is "data-only", that doesn't stop anyone from using VOIP. And with 100Mbps to spare, you can cram quite a lot of seperate voice channels in there, ideally. Of course, this would only be really feasible if the whole internet worked at these kinds of speeds, instead of just one fiber network.
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Come to think of it, i'm going to graduate from college soon, anyone know where i could possibly find some apartments that are wired with T1's or T3's? I've heard of those before.
Only using one half of one percent of the theoretical bandwidth is not that bad. A better comparison would be current realized bandwidth : current maximum realizable bandwidth : someday maximum realizable bandwidth. Theoretical maximum bandwidth doesn't mean much. Show me the Mr. Fusion first!
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
I bet it only lights up 5% of the room =)
The last line of the article sums it up nicely - this is all inevitable, not revolutionary or even particularly noteworthy. Cogent, Yipes et. al. are just taking advantage of a few relatively recent developments - the increased availability and affordability of dark fiber and Gigabit Ethernet hardware, and the maturation of DWDM. There's nothing terribly proprietary about that, aside from hundreds of millions of VC dollars and vendor financing plus the balls to build a very expensive network with a relatively small (albeit potential-customer-rich) footprint in the last mile.
Even if fiber deployment is on the way to solving the last mile problem (at least for business), it still doesn't solve the problem that really impacts the speed and reliability of internet service for most people: lack of fast, highly-distributed peering between networks. The speed of your backbone and tail circuits matters little if only a certain percentage of the entire internet is directly connected to them, unless you also have fast peering with other networks wherever possible. If there are dozens of "OC-192-or-greater-per-wavelength on DWDM on dark fiber" backbones, with Ethernet (regular, Fast and Gigabit) tails, each of which has only maybe a handful of OC-3 or even OC-12 peering connections to most of the others, the problem will still not be solved. If anything, it will get worse, because the users with faster last miles attached to faster backbones will expect proportionally faster service, and they won't get it.
There are people working to solve this problem, in various ways - running neutral peering facilities, aggressively seeking peering arrangements (although mostly in a few locations, unfortunately), buying lots of transit bandwidth from major providers (again, mostly in a few locations), etc. There are only a few who are truly solving the distribution aspect of the problem, though, by obtaining peering and transit connections to other networks in many locations evenly distributed around the country, in a mostly rational and consistent manner based on traffic analysis and other factors.
This is only one step in building a public internet infrastructure we can all depend on, but it is a crucial one.
fnord.
fnord.
new Linux release out - time to grab an .iso:
.iso.
100 Mbps / 8 bits/byte / 1024/1024 = 11.9 MB/sec
so for 50% utilization - figure 6 MB/sec
654 MB
------ = 109 seconds.
6 MB/sec
I'm going to need a faster CDROM burner.
Seriously - I still think that snail-mailing the latest Linux distro is a more efficient use of (very limited) resources than each person downloading their own
BUT - (Anne Marie) - its not up to me (or anyone else) to determine how people use THEIR Internet connection. The ISP can certainly cache content locally, thus only impacting other users on that part of the network when they access something that's bandwidth intensive. If the user is complying with the TERMS OF SERVICE of their user agreement, then it doesn't matter if they look at goat pr0n 24 x 7 x 365 - as long as it isn't kiddie goat pr0n.
Don't impose your morals on something that is Amoral - how people user their Internet connection.
.
I have been saying this for a while, but people like me, who live out in the stix...aren't helped at all by these companies that are loading the internet with highbandwidth connections. Almost all of these new pipes and stuff are only available in large cities. I can't even get cable where I live, and the phonelines are old and not capable of dsl or anything. What would really impress me is a company that sets out to give country folk a connection to the internet. I get 36k on a good day....
:) Thanks for listening to my rant. erm..reading even.
Some people say that this will never happen because there isn't enough people living out here to make it economically viable, but I disagree. One satellite dish or something set on a mountain nearby could connect people within a 30 mile radius of me. That is a lot of people...and I know most of them would jump at the chance of getting high speed internet access. I would be willing to pay more than $100 a month for a good connection. Trout Run Pennsylvania needs broadband.
The anti-salmon
After looking at all these replies, I thought I'd reply myself.
Some notes:
If you live near one of these trunks, well, happy for you. However, remember than less than 50% of the US population lives inside one of the top 100 urban areas.
The real challenge is not the big urban areas - they can (and probably will) get fiber-to-the-curb within 10 years at the worst case. The challenge is getting it to the 30-40% of the USA that live in sub-100,000 urban areas, and even worse, the 10% or so that are classified rural.
It's the same problem the USA faced with electrification in the 1920s and 1930s. Only now, it's worse, since a far, far smaller percentage of the population lives in the harder-to-wire areas, there is even less of an incentive to fiber them up.
I can use my home town as an example: Meadville,PA, population 15,000. It's easily 40 miles to the nearest city which would have a fiber trunk into it, and while the town might eventually have fiber as part of the Cable Modem rollout, it's certainly not going to be fiber-to-the-curb, and the cable modem rollout will miss the other 70,000 people who live in the county (which is rather rural). Population density for my county: 82 people/sq mile.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
(to paraphase the old "it's the economy, stupid" catchphrase of the last election...)
The article is plain wrong on several points, and makes naive and/or inane assumptions on several others.
First off, virtually all the long-distance communication wires in the US & Canada are fibre. Both voice and data travel over fiber (NOT copper) for about 99% of all inter-metropolitan traffic. Yet that fibre represents less than 10% (I forget the exact number, but it's less than 10%) of the entire physical communications plant in North America. The reason this is all fiber now is that it was by far the cheapest, easiest, and quickest return on investment portion of the network to upgrade. The article completely ignores the fact that the other 90+% of the network is extremely costly and time-consuming to replace with fiber and has a much, much, much longer ROI.
In places like Manhattan, where there is extremely high population density and communications demand, yes, fiber has been laid along (some) streets, and it is possible to put out a direct fiber lead to a large building that goes directly to a fiber line. If you're in on of the top 25 Metropolitan Areas in N.A., you might have a fiber line within a mile or so. Outside there, well, if you've got one within 10 miles, consider yourself lucky.
The problem still remains getting high-speed communications to places that don't astronomical population density. It's a hard problem, and condemning companies that provide more-or-less universal access for using copper is moronic. Cogent might be able to offer access to what, maybe 5% of the population? Compare this with WorldCom, the ILECs, MCI, and Earthlink, and all the other big ISPs, who can probably get between 95 and 99% of the entire population.
I also love the part where they seem to think that building their own long-distance backbone instead of using others is a panacea for network conjestion. Someone need to explain the concept of Peering and Wide-Area routing to these folks. Sure, it's nice if both the source and destination are plugged directly into your backbone, but the odds of this are what, virtually nill? If you want some real benefit from your own backbone, you have to connect directly with the majority of sites people want to access. In this case, you better beg Above.Net, Exodus, GlobalCenter, Genuity, et al. (all the big co-lo people) to allow you to run a line into all their co-lo sites. Oh, and since you're a small player, don't think that these folks aren't going to charge you for the privilege of hooking into their co-lo.
The other thing I find stupid is the implication that only Cogent has a "data-optimized" network. What a load of Marketing BS. If I'm running a packet-switched network, can I tell what I'm running on top of it (well, with ATM technically you can, but it's really all data)? Data? Voice-over-IP? Streaming Video? The article seems to confuse the concepts of packet-switched vs. circuit-switched with "data-optimized" vs. "voice-optimized".
Anyway, I'm sure others are going to point the myriad of crap in this article, so I'll stop here.
Cogent is offering a nice service, and has some interesting features that may point the way to how communications are done in the future. They're not really innovative in any sense, and I certainly wouldn't think of them as the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's an interesting company, and I wish them will. But the hype level is just a tad too high here.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
There is no Moore's Law for fiber. I don't know where this guys source is, but the amount of data going down a fiber isn't going to double every 10 months. There are many new problems cropping up the faster you go. They just aren't easy to solve (basic physics).The polarization of the light as it travels down the fiber isn't understood. .5% of the theoretical fiber capacity is great and all. The space shuttle also travels way less than the theoretical speed (c, the speed of light).
And saying we are at
I'd put my money into optical parts being made cheaper. I wouldn't put my money on the amount of data through a fiber doubling every 10 months.