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Last-Mile Fiber Optic
Johnny Mnemonic writes "The newsletter "The Town Paper" tracks the development of "traditional" new developments--developments with integrated shopping, parks, and that are pedestrian friendly. Their recent issue has an article that describes a new community in Issaquah WA that has, among it's interesting features: a wired LAN in every home, free community Intranet, and a choice for a fiber optic connection. It is probably no coincidence that Microsoft is planning on building 3 million square feet of office space there. How much is a pre-wired house worth to you? What will this do for community building?"
I always wondered why urban comunities didn't have all the wiring and fiber available to the residents. Large apartment buildings next to eachother would probably find it cheaper to have one large connection into the complexes and hire a network technican, than to have separate service providers (DSL, cable, etc) for each resident..
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Free your mind.
Since I have wired every dwelling I have occupied with cat5 and a patch panel since 1986, this doesn't seem so much forward looking to me as finally catching up. I wonder how the community Intranet will be administered, if it is anything like the "community parks" these developments usually include to sell the units, then chances are it is going to be left to virtually grow over with weeds (unpatched servers, slow hubs/switches) after the units have been purchased. Of course, since Microsoft is moving in, it might become yet another way to promote MSN.
Of course, it seems more cost-effective to just blanket the area with Wi-Fi...
The best way to do is to be.
A pre-wired house isn't worth much, to a geek like me. To someone else it's probably worth a lot.
The reason? Well, being a geek I would want my wires in a very specific configuration just for me. I would be pissed off about having the jack in the wrong part of the wall. I wouldn't like having to modify my computing to match the house. I want the house to match the way I like to do things. Ideally I would have one room of the house with many computers in it and many cables. I would have an office with one computer in it, wired. Every other room in the house woul be accomodated by a single WAP.
If it's expensive fiber or a configuration I have to adapt to, rather than one that adapts to me I wont like it.
Non geek people would love it though, if they can get it to work.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
For some reason people always mistake the word "fibre" for nirvana, computing paradise, the valhalla of networking. Fact is I've got cable internet and it can handle up to 10Mbps, far more than they actually give me. I'd kill for a 10Mbit link, let alone 100Mbit. The thing that kills you isn't the physical layer, it's the routing and throttling your ISP does -- fibre in itself changes nothing. Give me cable internet with fast routing and no bandwidth caps over fibre any day...
A pre-wired house, yes I'd love it.
But a whole intranet community? I don't like the idea of being LANned up with the whole estate. Surely there'll be plenty of people who have no idea how to secure their boxes and suchlike...? Could easily be a black hats heaven, especially in a corporate environment.
Mind you, it'd give the opportunity for the biggest beowulf-cluster-of-LAN-parties ever.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
That would be quite interesting. I'd have to say gaming would rock, but I sure hope all the Joe Windows users know how to use Windows Update...
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
>besides 1MS ping neighbourhood deathmatches? You need internet speed for anything else?
While a community intranet seems like a nice idea, I'm afraid it will likely be strangled by the unforgiving leash of community policy that's become so popular in modern neighborhood developments. As a form of legislation by contract, not usually subject to constitutional protections, neighborhoods could easily prohibit any but the most inoffensive content being hosted by servers connected to the intranet.
An anarchist intranet, on the other hand, would be a joy to see.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
The problem with having incredibly fast last mile is that you need incredibly, incredibly fast upstream connectivity
Uh, yeah, isn't that the point?
Not to be glib, but the network doens't grow symmetrically. There are always going to be bottlenecks, but there are always going to be improvements. When you build a new apartment complex, it makes sense to assume that the permanent network infrastructure in the building should, where economically feasible, be overbuilt as much as possible.
It will be a while, if ever, before they can use all of their bandwidth, but when the time comes they are ready, eh.
Send lawyers, guns, and money. Dad, get me out of this.
Ok, regardless of the technical details regarding this "village", what about the social aspects? Do people really want to live in a "utopian society" such as this?
After looking at the brochures, I am startlingly reminded of scary sci-fi movies of years past, where the village residents all have the same prozac-happy, blank smiles, all work together for the same corporation, and all barbeque together on the weekends.
Again, maybe it's just me , but a place like this (whether wired or wireless or whatever) just doesn't sound like a place I'd want to call home.
Stepford wives, anyone??
The older I get, the less I like everyone else.
When you build a new apartment complex, it makes sense to design in proper conduit channels so whatever is needed in the future can be easily pulled into each unit. That does not necessarily translate into pulling whatever expensive cabling happens to be 'bleeding edge' at the time.
all this wireless talk.
.and why should I if there's an alternative. I'm looking at replacing my 100MB/s switch & nic's with gigabit stuff for just that reason. It'd be nice to VNC into a box and get near-realtime ability. Granted, not everyone is like me in this respect, but alot are, and the way the internet community is going, alot more will be.
Sure, wireless is a great system for some things, but it nowhere near approaches the speed of fibre. This kind of shortsightedness in the past has cost us, why let it again?
(640k anyone? 32MB harddrive? those are just a couple that came to mind right away)
With a wireless solution, you're looking at buying it, and implementing it, then upgrading every couple/few years if you want to keep the bandwidth up to what other areas will (probably) be using. With fibre, lay it, and maintain it and you still have enough left over to keep you going for ages. Even when that slows down, divide the network in half, each their own network with their own uplink. Boom. Doubled your available bandwidth.
Don't kid yourself thinking we (as a people) won't want more and more bandwidth. If I had the bandwidth I have today (DSL) at home 7 years ago, I would have thought that it was the cat's meow. Now I get by, it's decent. Actually thought of getting a cable modem as well so I could have two *decent* pipes here.
Warez trading, p2p, and porn asside, even legitimate usages have been getting bigger all the time.
(SUSE 8.0 anyone? 8 cds for the full release. Even slackware, my distrib of choice is 3 now for everything).
Couple this on the fact that one day the mpaa/riaa might get it right and we could have huge content delivered to our homes via these pipes. I'd rather be able to watch a movie (and save it for later) while it's downloading, then wait a couple hours. Sometimes it's just a spur of the moment... "hey, wouldn't it be cool to see this?"
Even 802.11g won't bring us this. Fibre will put it alot closer (altho it's not a miracle answer, it is a step in the right direction). We probably won't have wireless that can compare until like 802.11zz894t Rev. 3 or something.
I won't even run wireless at home just because I'm such a speed freak, I don't want to wait..
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
This is becoming more and more frequent in new master-planned developments. The "FTTH Council" currenty lists 78 communities and municipalities that are already providing FTTH service. You can grab the list from the FTTH Council here.There are many other communities that are not on this list yet because service hasn't actually been turned on.
Having Cat5 home run from several rooms to a central panel has slowly become the standard for new homes in many areas. I began forcing this on our builders about 4 years ago. As someone else pointed out, builders are very conservative... but if you can show them that it will only take $500 more than they currently pay and that they HAVE to do it because all of the other builders are doing it, then they'll fall in line with only a little grumbling. Of course this is really only possible withing certain price ranges. Most of the homes in our developments are $250k and up.
The "Community Intranets" are also fairly common in larger communities. They range from small sites that the developer hires a high-school kid to put together, to specific sites built from "intranet packages" that are tailored for large developments. Examples of vendors include Neighborware and Resident Interactive.
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I hate mornings.