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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!
- 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
not everyone can pay the $15k setup fee ;)
- Bill
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.
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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+.
3 gigabit or gigabyte? 3 gigabit isn't much -- barely 300MB (i.e. not enough to install red-hat. 3gigabyte, on the other hand, is pretty snazzy). I'm also presuming that it's 3G in either direction... otherwise, 3Bbit of response packets isn't very bad (if you're mostly doing downloading).
`ø,,ø`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
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.
This sounds alot like the argument that people used when DSL lines were brand new! The fact is, if enough people get faster connections, then the major backbones are going to have to work harder(and R&D alot more) to develop faster routing.. if you build it, they will come!!
Look at it from an apartment building's perspective. One 100MB connection is awfully fast, and if you give each tennant >=T1 speeds from their apartment, you could make quite a profit off of it.. Who wouldn't mind paying $35 a month for their share of one of these lines...
If this was in my neighborhood, I know many other college students living near me would subscribe. Screw the rest of the internet, I don't care if pages load in .005 seconds, as opposed to .006 seconds, but if me and my friends were all in the same area, all connected to the 100MB fibers, Gaming would really kick ass. And then we wouldn't have to worry about trying to string cat5 all over the neighborhood very discreetly!!!
------------------------------------------
If God Droppd Acid, Would he see People???
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
no.
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.
But you just need one set of tools to do lots of splicing. A thermal splice machine costs >> 500 bux I think. About 20000 USD perhaps, but a good one with a good splicer one can splice up to 64 fibres per night. The 500 bux tool maybe a diamond cutter?!
Maybe you are talking about those "raw" terminators (which you stick in the end of a fibre to the connector), which is not so good. Good terminators should come with its own "tail" fibre properly terminated to the SC/FC-PC connector, and the splicer's job is to splice the "tail" fibre to the incoming fibre. This way, the splice loss/reflection loss is much less.
As an individual, you call in the cavalry! (i.e.your evil local service provider)
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
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.
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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.