Flexible Optic Fiber Promises Cheaper Last Mile

bn0p writes "Ars Technica has an article on a Korean company that has developed a low-cost, flexible, plastic optical fiber that could bring cheaper 2.5 Gbps connections to homes and apartments. While not as fast as glass fiber, it is significantly faster than copper. In related news, Corning recently announced a flexible glass fiber that can be bent repeatedly without losing signal strength. The Corning fiber incorporates nanostructures in the cladding of the fiber that act as 'light guardrails' to keep the light in the fiber. The glass fiber could be as much as four times faster than plastic fiber. Neither fiber is available commercially yet, but both should help with the last mile problem when they are deployed."

Comments

Cabling expense

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Physical cabling, of any sort, is cheap if you're already digging trenches etc.

If you don't have other reasons to dig trenches etc, then wireless is typically far cheaper because the installation costs are zero.

Re:Cabling expense

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Physical cabling, of any sort, is cheap if you're already digging trenches etc.

This explains why Europe is so far ahead of the U.S. in terms of broadband penetration.

Re:Cabling expense

[calebt3]

But it is less reliable. And the highest speeds offered by Clearwire in my area is the lowest speed offered by Comcast.

Re:Cabling expense

[totally bogus dude]

Where are the mod points when you need them?!

Re:Cabling expense

[westlake]

If you don't have other reasons to dig trenches etc, then wireless is typically far cheaper because the installation costs are zero

If the installation costs are zero, why has municipal WiFi flat-lined?

Re:Cabling expense

[Bandman]

all kinds of reasons.

-wireless backbones suck after you get too many nodes, and maintaining dedicated landlines to APs gets expensive quickly
-maintaining an infrastructure of finicky boxes in inaccessible locations which need constant coddling to maintain their functionality
-rampant bandwidth abuse (see tragedy of the commons)
-overly limited access locations due to the distance limitations, and the fact that tree leaves suck up 2.4ghz like no one's business

And despite that, there are some places where they work. Bryant Park in NYC is awesome for relaxing and doing some surfing or work. It's a hotspot operated by Google.

Re:Cabling expense

[HiggsBison]

I thought that the big hangup was the cost of terminating the optical connectors. Some guy with a PhD in Union Electricianology has to sit there and hand polish each fiber end for about 15 or 20 minutes. This is cheap if you're going town to town, but if you have to do it for every apartment and bungalow, suddenly it really adds up.

Re:Cabling expense

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet should have been IPX-SPX instead of TCPIP, and you fucking know it.

Re:Cabling expense

[timeOday]

Finally some dividends from WWI.

Re:Cabling expense

[terrymr]

Massive lobbying campaigns by incumbent telcos, who in some cases even bought laws prohibiting such municipal systems.

Re:Cabling expense

[insertwackynamehere]

So...how about that Thomas Edison.. MOVING picture you say? But what if it gets tired from moving??! Thank you, I'll be here all 1910s.

Re:Cabling expense

[terrymr]

Overrated ? I was asking what the guys point was.

Re:Cabling expense

[mpe]

If you don't have other reasons to dig trenches etc, then wireless is typically far cheaper because the installation costs are zero.

The installation costs of wireless are certainly not zero, especially if there isn't an existing power supply or structure to attach the equiptment to. Just that it tends to be cheaper than running cables, in most situations.

Re:Cabling expense

[nmg196]

> wireless is typically far cheaper because the installation costs are zero.

Err, no. Wireless is very expensive to install. Even more expensive perhaps than mobile phone networks (mainly because you need 50-100 times more access points than you need for mobile phones (due to the very low transmission powers the standard permits).

Why do you think that there are almost no cities with city-wide wireless access, years after the technology became prevalent? Most people have problems getting WiFi working in their house - let alone trying to get it to work for a whole town without all the channels massively overlapping. Municipal WiFi won't take off until the standard (perhaps a NEW standard) allows higher transmission powers and a larger frequency band for extra channels.

Re:Cabling expense

[CoonAss56]

They have cam-lock type fiber ends with a gel in it for awhile now. I've used them and the old days of polishing are gone, thank god.

Re:Cabling expense

[Ephemeriis]

wireless is typically far cheaper because the installation costs are zero.

Sure, in theory, it's cheaper because you don't have to sling cables/dig trenches/whatever... But in practice I've found it usually costs just as much as a wired installation, if not more.

Wireless if fickle. You'll have a great connection in one room and then it'll go to hell in the next. You'll be fine with five users connected and then it'll go to hell when a sixth connects. The weather affects signal strength, as do human bodies, and furniture, and anything else that gets between you and the AP. It's hard to deliver consistent wireless connectivity.

With a wired network you can install a single switch and run cables out to fairly distant locations... With wireless, you need an AP within reach of each device connecting... And then you've still got to get the APs connected back to your router - typically with a wire.

Re:Cabling expense

[Pikoro]

There is no last mile problem. In Korea, and most of the rest of the world, we use kilometers ;) Also, the reason that the "last mile" is such a big issue in the US is that there are so damn many more of them. "Last Mile" in Korea or Japan might mean 1 or 2 km from the closest switch box, whereas in the US, it might be tens of miles...

Re:Cabling expense

[walt-sjc]

WiFi SUCKETH. Hell - I can hardly get it to work in my house much less across town. I've repositioned my access point numerous times, purchased external antennas, etc. I'm even on a channel not used by other AP's nearby (BTW, there really are only about 3 USABLE channels out there due to overlap.)

2.4Ghz is a cesspool used by WAY WAY too many competing technologies. Unfortunately, it's hard to find devices that support the 5Ghz band, so that's not a viable alternative at the moment. Even many of the new N devices don't support it.

The only way it works across any distance at all is in wide open spaces with directional antennas. Pah. I spit on wifi. While every room in my house has multiple cat-5e drops totaling well over a mile worth of cable, not every device can or should be wired. Wifi is good for some things, but shared high speed access over long distances is not one of them.

Installation costs for wifi are hardly zero.

Frankly, cheap flexible fiber would be nice for other things too. I would love to use a simple fiber cable instead of the abortion that is HDMI. The 50' HDMI cable I bought ended up 1/2" thick and is a bear to bend - makes it hard to plug into the flatscreen on the wall.

Re:Cabling expense

[walt-sjc]

It hardly takes 15-20 mins. Maybe your first time, but once you have done a few you can pound them out fairly quickly.

Re:Cabling expense

[MECC]

2.4Ghz is a cesspool used by WAY WAY too many competing technologies.

That's pretty much it. I set up WiFi for a nationwide retailer (over 500 stores nationwide) and interference from other 2.4 Ghz devices was a big problem - as big as and in some cases bigger than physical barriers. Nearly every store had 2.4 Ghz cordless phones (among other things). They had to either scrap them, or give up on inventory. Not a choice they liked to make.

Re:Cabling expense

[Tony Hoyle]

The installation costs are not zero.

Unless you've found a free supply of commercial grade wifi routers, free connections for them to a backbone, volunteers to do all the installation, etc.

If the trench (pipe, tunnel, etc. depending on location) already exists then installation of wired connections can be far lower than than wifi - and installing a fiber bundle gives orders of magnitude more bandwidth availablility == more options to make your money back.

Re:Cabling expense

[Anonymous Coward]

Hitler was ahead of the US in freeways too. Look how that turned out.

Re:Cabling expense

[Fission86]

It still surprises me that they don't start building cities that can adapt to these kinds of changes without having to dig up ground, etc. Build the city like a decently designed data center which utilizes false floors to keep cables out of the way yet are still semi-accessible. Like some kind of sewer system for electronics or something.

Re:Cabling expense

[MetaPhyzx]

Er what he said (Bandman). Also note that the parent poster stated that wifi is CHEAPER, not cost free.

Re:Cabling expense

[Anonymous Coward]

The time and effort depends on the fiber and the quality required. Long runs with multi-mode fiber need very careful termination. Plastic fiber (what this article about) is used for short runs and requires much less effort. I've used plastic fiber where you just snap the end off and it's good enough for very short runs.

Re:Cabling expense

[bigpicture]

Cable companies do not dig trenches to lay cable around neighborhoods, or even to replace existing infrastructure. It is done by horizontal drilling and pulling through a PVC type conduit. Then the cable gets pulled inside that. No digging up streets or sidewalks, and if it happens to be fiber optic, then less chance of lightening zapping your expensive electronics than with copper or wireless.

Re:Cabling expense

[Anonymous Coward]

Last century there were some skirmishes across Europe that resulted in lots of trenches being dug for warfare. It was only a fairly minor battle though and not widely reported, so it's understandable you might not be aware of it. Kind of an "in joke" for those who happen to have heard about it.

Two decades too late

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Flexible fiber optic may be a great solution for our broadband needs, but their true calling is now twenty years passed.

Re:Two decades too late

[renegadesx]

And just in time for the new Australian Govt's national fibre rollout plan too

Re:Two decades too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess they call it Wig Diva because if they called it Wig Suicide Girl they probably wouldn't get as many sales.

Actually,

[WindBourne]

The plastic one would be great in the last 100 feet (33 meters). It would be nice to run fiber through the home, as well as a cat 5. The cat 5 can carry power (POE). But if that plastic can carry 2.5G AND is easy AND cheap to install, it will quickly make waves in the housing industry.

Re:Actually,

[hjf]

CAT6a and CAT7 can work up to 10G, provided you use appropriate connectors such as Siemon's TERA, which can also be used for carrying telephone and CATV over the same wire. If you need the full 10G, you use 4 pairs. If you don't need 10G, you can use less pairs and the rest for other things (i.e: your PVR could use CATV, POTS, and still have 5Gbps for data). I know, I know, when 10G is commonplace, maybe we won't have CATV and POTS anyway.

Re:Actually,

[Firethorn]

I'd rather just run a couple copper wires with the fiber if you want a combined power/information source. PoE is something of a hack. You'd be able to push more power with a couple of dedicated wires, for lower cost - simpler construction because you only need a couple wires even if you increase the gauge, don't need to twist them, etc...

As for the other poster, I've seen those connectors - complex and expensive looking even(especially?) compared with fiber connectors. After a certain point fiber IS cheaper than copper.

Though to be honest, wiring new houses with cat6 today would be cheap, you could have a little switching center in a closet somewhere to decide which ones are phone lines and which ones are data lines. Stick the networking hardware in there as well. Running it through conduit would increase cost, but allow relatively inexpensive upgrades(like if fiber to the desktop becomes common enough to be in houses).

Still, I'd estimate that cat6 won't be unusably obsolete to the desktop for ~15 years. Gigabit ethernet is fast enough to stream at least a compressed HDTV stream. Of course, you'd technically be able to run HDTV over a 10mbit connection by my calcs at least.

Re:Actually,

[Jeff DeMaagd]

POE is basically irrelevant. You may as well forget about it. It's not going to power anything but the lowest power devices. I do have a POE setup for the device from the ISP, the bandwidth from that device certainly isn't limited by the copper. POE will work for a wired VoIP phone though, but then, I think people favor cordless devices, neither really push enough to merit the use of fiber.

Re:Actually,

[Anonymous Coward]

> Still, I'd estimate that cat6 won't be unusably obsolete to the desktop for ~15 years. Gigabit ethernet is fast enough to stream at least a compressed HDTV stream. Of course, you'd technically be able to run HDTV over a 10mbit connection by my calcs at least.

Standard ATSC HD streams are up to 19.3Mbps. A few of these can comfortably stream on a decent 100Mbps switch.

Gigabit ethernet is plenty for any home use I know of.

The original post about the 2.4Gbps fiber in the home is just silly. Aside from being VERY expensive equipment needed for high speed fiber at home (price out a couple NICs and a switch.. it's more than your computer), there is no application for that speed. Unless you've got a couple of fast disk arrays that can keep up with those speeds, not even huge file transfers can keep up with that.

Re:Actually,

[Firethorn]

Standard ATSC HD streams are up to 19.3Mbps. A few of these can comfortably stream on a decent 100Mbps switch.

Thanks, I was looking for those figures, but couldn't find them, so I went off from some compressed video I have - it's 720p, and came out to be around 1megabit. Plenty of room to stream that, at least across a switched 10mbit network.

Hmmm... wiki lists ATSC as being able to carry 'several' video and audio streams, but that's probably at lower than maximum resolutions.

Given your example, yeah, you'd be able to use a 100mbit switch easily.

Heck, where I work we still had some users on a 10mbit hub - about a dozen of them. They rarely noticed. Meanwhile other areas were on gigabit, but the people on the hub were in a wierd location and their equipment was so old we didn't notice it for a while.

Until we start playing with 60fps 1080p editing studio quality video(1.5-3Gbit/s), we should be good with cat6 gigabit switches.

I think that a good clue about how much bandwidth is actually needed is that many people are perfectly happy with their 802.11g network. The category of people who would actually benefit from upgrading from 100mbit to gigabit for home use is actually quite limited. I don't really notice unless I'm trying to move gigabytes of data - and even that takes a chunk of time to move between hard drives.

Re:Actually,

[walt-sjc]

Just a FYI, gigabit doesn't need cat6. 5e works fine. Plain cat5 is limited to 100Mb.

Re:Actually,

[Firethorn]

Very true, however I've been talking in terms of maximum longevity - cat6 can ultimately support higher speeds than cat5e, but doesn't cost that much more. So if we're wiring a building at construction we're better off pulling cat6 over cat5e.

Maybe I should have said cat6 infrastructure and gigabit switches.

Anyways, while they have some funky connectors capable of allowing 10gbit over copper, I'm not so sure that we won't see an 'intermittent' step of something like 2-10gbit, or even a switch towards stuff like what's present on many home use long-haul circuits - they dynamically manage their transmission rates to maximize bandwidth while retaining the necessary signal to noise ratio - dirty circuit, you lose speed, not link.

So that cat5e link might get 1.2 gigabit, while that cat6 link gets 5gbit. That old cat5 run that hasn't been updated in decades gets 250 megabit, the really old cat3 hackjob that nobody's been able to come up with the money to replace gets 75mbit.

Re:Actually,

[cymen]

ATSC can indeed carry more than one stream/subchannel per channel and, as you hypothesized, the total capacity of the channel is reduced by each additional subchannel. In my area (Madison, Wisconsin), PBS broadcasts 5 streams. One or two occasionally have HD content while the rest have SD content. Another channel broadcasts their regular analog channel contents along with a second subchannel that has low bit rate weather content. According to various posts over at avsforum, the equipment at that channel can dynamically allocate bandwidth to subchannels as required to ensure a consistent level of quality.

The hair in the pudding though is that a "consistent level of quality" is a judgment call. I watch all of the ATSC content via S-Video on a SD 27" television but according to those that have HD sets the quality impact of subchannels "stealing bits" from the main HD content is noticeable. So we're back to the similar problem seen with over compressed HD (and SD) content from DBS providers (Dish, DirecTV, etc).

On a /. note, there is work going on with MythTV to enable recording of more than one subchannel from the same channel with a single tuner. It makes sense that the total channel is a bit stream and the content is multiplexed into that bitstream. So a single tuner should be able to demultiplex and write to disk all of the subchannels or the desired one(s). I think it's actually already in SVN or as a branch in SVN.

Re:Actually,

[Firethorn]

The hair in the pudding though is that a "consistent level of quality" is a judgment call. I watch all of the ATSC content via S-Video on a SD 27" television but according to those that have HD sets the quality impact of subchannels "stealing bits" from the main HD content is noticeable. So we're back to the similar problem seen with over compressed HD (and SD) content from DBS providers (Dish, DirecTV, etc).

Part of this is probably the fact that they're using ancient cpu cheap compression schemes. Some of the MPEG-4 type codecs would be able to give a superior picture even with a lower bitrate. If they were able to assume a couple extra bucks worth of additional decoder processing capacity it'd allow better picture quality.

Of course, this whole video thing came up because we were looking for bandwidth intensive tasks - and streaming video is still top dog. If we start streaming 3D video, or get so obsessed with quality that we shift towards 1080p(or higher) 60 fps low compression video, then yeah, we can saturate a gigabit link with a single stream. Today we'd need multiple HDTV streams, at pretty low compression, to saturate a gigabit link. Smart compression would allow it easily over a 100mbit connection.

Besides - once you start getting into gigabit ethernet you start getting into the range that a single HD can't keep up with it.

no they won't

[EjectButton]

Not in the United States anyway, our "last mile problem" has a lot more to do with entrenched telecom and cable companies with regional monopolies than any sort of fiber bendiness.

Re:no they won't

[calebt3]

Those monopolies only exist because they have the government's blessing. You can bet that they will be broken up shortly if the legislators find out that they could be getting their pr0n faster. Unless maybe those monopolies give enough bribe money that the legislator can pay for a 2.5Gb connection without thinking twice.

Re:no they won't

[Courageous]

Cable Television in many areas of the US is not government sanctioned as a monopoly, but is one anyway, because the situation is indeed natural. Has to do with the economics of digging and competing. Better not to, just tacitly agree to territories.

C//

Re:no they won't

[rnturn]

Where I used to live, the phone company was over two years behind their projected date for having ADSL available in the local CO when we moved to a new home in a neighboring town. I heard that they only recently got the equipment in. (And we moved out of that town over six years ago.)

Based on the local telco monopoly's past performance, I expect this new technology to hit my town by about, oh, 2018. They have little to no incentive to install new equipment as they can still make a ton of money on the scarce (by their own inaction) bandwidth.

Re:no they won't

[poot_rootbeer]

Those monopolies only exist because they have the government's blessing.

And they only have the government's blessing because it would be a logistical and economic nightmare if all the streets had to be dug up or another set of utility poles erected every time another company decided they wanted to provide residential telecom services.

Last mile = Apartment Buildings

[imstanny]

Flexible fiber optics would do wonders for apartment buildings and its residents. With cable going digital in 2009, this would be very important. BTW - check out the back of your plates - it may be made by Corning as well (mine is).

Re:Last mile = Apartment Buildings

[calebt3]

This could be a good incentive for a us to finally get out of our parent's basements and into apartments of our own.

Re:Last mile = Apartment Buildings

[explosivejared]

There will still be monopolies and that's a fact. The only change that may made is in who is playing the game. This could do wonders however in kicking out the telcos already entrenched and fattened with fiber money which they have done nothing constructive with.

Re:Last mile = Apartment Buildings

[Firethorn]

Cable is already mostly digital, in many areas. Or were you thinking about the shutting off of analog broadcast TV that's happening in 2009?

Besides, shipping digital data over coax is not exactly unknown technology. modern technologies can have it carrying lots of digital technology, in that you can treat it like a whole range of RF channels - it'd be like transmitting on every channel available for 802.11a,g, and hundreds more*. It's kinda like increasing transmission over a single fiber by using lasers of varying frequency(color).

Besides, fiber requires a transmitter for every line - it's a star topology by default, not a bus like coax can be. That increases expense.

Fiber can beat coax in bandwidth - but you're talking some high end equipment to do it.

Doesn't mean that I don't think that they shouldn't be running fiber to the home though, preferably at least 8 pairs.

*Vast simplification.

Re:Last mile = Apartment Buildings

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Now it will be feasible to move next door, because I can mooch off of their FiOS at full speed for cheap. Plus, if I have any trouble with it, I can tell my mom when she comes over to do my laundry.

Re:Last mile = Apartment Buildings

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, fiber requires a transmitter for every line - it's a star topology by default, not a bus like coax can be. That increases expense.

I don't think that's right. You can use passive splitters to connect multiple devices to the same fiber line. Verizon does this for their FiOS service: it's how they connect 32 houses on a single fiber line.

Here be a wiki on the subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network

Will this matter?

[tsotha]

I don't think the cost of the actual cable will change the equation very much. I've been out of it for more than ten years, but even then you could get fiber for less than $1/foot - I assume it's even cheaper now. I have to believe most of the cost lies in planning, getting permits, and digging trenches.

Re:Will this matter?

[guruevi]

Depending on what you want it's between 50c and $1,50 per foot. Compare that to CAT5e which is $0,05/foot, multiply by 200.

Re:Will this matter?

[timeOday]

$200 is only 3 months of Comcast subscription fees.

Re:Will this matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

That or in paying exorbitantly high salaries to fat upper execs and large bribes to politicians out of your government subsidized localized monopoly business.

Just a theory though, I might be wrong.

Re:Will this matter?

[walt-sjc]

But not all of that $200 can pay for the installation. It also pays for back-end systems, labor, and content. Increase the materials cost and it takes an extra YEAR to recover, or more. On the other hand, you can offer more services over fiber and perhaps increase your billings. There is a limit to how much people will pay for non-critical services however in most markets. Comcast basically wants about $100 / month / subscriber (phone, internet, TV package.) That's about max they can get away with.

Re:Will this matter?

[Velcroman98]

Many cable companies are at least semi-regulated, as are telcos. If I remember correctly telcos are required to depreciate their capitol equipment expenditures over 30 years. The switch and wire-plant in your local CO would be the capitol, then they upgrade and expand with other depreciation schedules.

With this in mind wouldn't the cable companies have to depreciate new cable/fiber over a longer period ensuring quicker profitability?

bandwidth(s)?

[nerdyalien]

Yes, we can get fibres to house really soon. Also I saw a nice 2D filter which can be used for Multiplexing fibre users in a single channel (Optical-CDMA).

But.. lets say all these goes really well... what about

1. Internet infrastructure... we here many people saying it will meltdown really soon. So what we really need is, upgrading the infrastructure/backbone of internet. I guess, still we can survive with last mile copper network with ADSL.

2. Regardles how much bandwidth you get, if your PC can't handle that bandwidth.. then all the killer apps won't be exciting.

I thing it is worth while to read journal papers written by Klienrock, he explains some of the things we really overlook in designing/building huge data networks.

Re:bandwidth(s)?

[calebt3]

If you build it, they will come...
Providing speeds like this will allow service providers to expand into new frontiers with internet connectivity. Real-time access to a remote drive comes to mind, as well as entirely hi-def video streams.

Re:bandwidth(s)?

[somersault]

Sounds like more of the same (but faster) rather than 'new frontiers'.. how about we get sort out the current mess before giving the spammers more bandwidth to work with???!? Bah..

Re:bandwidth(s)?

[somersault]

Looks like the spamlords have mod points today.. either that or people who think streaming HDTV over the internet is going to give them unlimited happiness..

Re:bandwidth(s)?

[walt-sjc]

Maybe not unlimited happiness, but maybe more choice. And maybe new ways to communicate with each other. The current internet is either too slow or too unreliable (latency, packet loss) for a lot of applications. Not only does "the last mile" need to improve, so does the backbone.

Frankly, the US needs to make REAL high-speed internet a reality to compete in the global market. In the next 30 years or so, it will be CRITICAL.

Re:bandwidth(s)?

[somersault]

By the time they do what you currently consider to be 'real' high speed internet, your expectations of 'real' may have changed, but I get your point. I still think we could be doing a lot more with what we already have if the amount of spam going around was cut down. I mean we can already do decent voice and even video calling through Skype, the only thing that can improve from there is the resolution, unless someone does design something better (but if you can already see and hear, then beyond touching, smelling and tasting - which could be cool but online would likely end up primarily for sexual purposes - what else do you really need to be able to communicate?). If we dont make the most with what we have already then we're going to get as bad as Microsoft.. using faster technology as an excuse for leaving the bloat in place. If for example Google designed a decent secure email protocol and integrated it into GMail, then we'd be heading in the right direction. So many people use IM apps already that it doesn't seem infeasible for someone to introduce some new protocol that could be designed into these apps that could just be used as a substitute for email.. just think how much of our current bandwidth is being wasted through spam directly, and through zombie botnets which are usually created and sustained by spammers - it's sickening!

cheaper 2.5 Gbps connections

[seanadams.com]

cheaper than the one I have now? sweet!

Vaporware? Hardly!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seeing the "vaporware" tag on this article prompted me to post... I can confirm first-hand that the Corning, Inc. flexible glass fiber is not vaporware. I realize posting as AC doesn't help me credibility, but I assure you it is real. Whether providers/installers/manufacturers pick it up is another issue entirely...

Re:Vaporware? Hardly!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll ditto that. That's my employer.

Re:Vaporware? Hardly!

[QuantumG]

Cool! Where can we buy it? How much does it cost?

Re:Vaporware? Hardly!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't tell you that, but I guarantee that it isn't vaporware.
Upcoming versions of our product will deliver speeds of 1.2c with 12Eb/s bandwidth,
providing ping times in the scale of -4ms and even less for longer distances.

Re:Vaporware? Hardly!

[wattrlz]

It's vaporware because none of us are going to see the effects of it for quite some time. Sure it exists, but you can't even tell us where to buy it.

Invest for the long-term

[r_jensen11]

What I don't get is why we seemingly refuse to invest for the long-term in the United States. Sure, some companies do, generally the smarter ones. But when it comes to public infrastructure, politicians haven't found a way to inform the public that by spending 2x as much now, we're saving 20x as much over the next n years.

I know that technology evolves at a rapid rate, but if we invest more money now and use the same amount of energy* now (compared to doing investing less money and the same amount of energy), then we can use the energy that's left over from not having to double our efforts next year for other causes.

*energy here is refering to human capital.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[Shajenko42]

What I don't get is why we seemingly refuse to invest for the long-term in the United States. Sure, some companies do, generally the smarter ones. But when it comes to public infrastructure, politicians haven't found a way to inform the public that by spending 2x as much now, we're saving 20x as much over the next n years.

Perhaps because we don't believe them?

It's easy to SAY that you'll save a lot in the future, and then not deliver. Most likely the particular politician that claimed that will have moved on by then, or the blame will be watered down across, for instance, the entire Senate.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[rmerry72]

...politicians haven't found a way to inform the public that by spending 2x as much now, we're saving 20x as much over the next n years.

Politicians, business leaders - hell most people - don't believe/see/understand/care (pick one) that a stitch in time really works. If they can't see immediate bang for buck then they won't support it. That's the way our world is now and has been for a while. Instant gratification. Apollo program got cut because of the same attitude, lack of spending in helath/roads/telecom, AT&T's video phone never took off (WTF?), even quadraphonic failed;

All because people just can't see past the day after tomorrow. If the effects won't be seen till next week, or next month, then wait till then to do something about it. Politicians really do implement the will of the people sometimes.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[Osty]

What I don't get is why we seemingly refuse to invest for the long-term in the United States. Sure, some companies do, generally the smarter ones. But when it comes to public infrastructure, politicians haven't found a way to inform the public that by spending 2x as much now, we're saving 20x as much over the next n years.

Some companies tried that and it didn't really work out all that well.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[ThousandStars]

In many ways we do invest for the long term. POTS has been around for about a century. For another example, my parents' house was built in 1996 or something like that, and they have an option for something like six phone lines if they so choose. Except they now use cell phones and have zero phone lines -- oops! All the money spent on those extra copper lines doesn't matter, but I know they'd use fiber optic lines if the builder had had the foresight to include them.

Fast forward to today. As I stated in an earlier post, there's a real danger that technology might solve the last mile problem through wireless. We might not, and if Verizon offered FIOS to my apartment I'd certainly take it over Clearwire, but telecom companies can't be eager to take the very real risk that in 10 years consumers will all be using laptops and iPhones connecting via whatever the successor to EVDO is/will be.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[p0tat03]

politicians haven't found a way to inform the public that by spending 2x as much now, we're saving 20x as much over the next n years.

Because they're not likely to be around in 15-20 years, or even more. By the time Joe Public realizes what a marvelous public infrastructure decision that was, 20 years ago, the politician is long gone from office, perhaps even retired. Why let the incumbent take all the glory for your handiwork? In the meantime the taxpayers are bitching and moaning about why they have to build this expensive infrastructure *now*. Politicians are only as short-sighted as the constituents they serve.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[Belial6]

Unfortunately, fiber would be just as bad of a long term decision. How about conduit. If instead of just allowing builders to lay wire, they should run conduit under the roads, and right up to the house, and that the conduit is owned by the city/county. The city/county could then rent the last mile to anyone that wants to offer data services. We could actually have competition in the telecom and cable tv industry. If this were done in new construction or during times when major reconstruction is already in progress, the cost would be dramatically less than than trying to do this in established neighborhoods. I would bet that once people started seeing the benefits, you would see demand for retrofitting older neighborhoods with conduit. This would also turn the last mile into an on going revenue source for the cities/counties.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[Xuranova]

Because most investors live their life a quarter at a time(you get the idea). You want to spend 2x now, that's fine. You gonna guarantee me 20x worth of savings in 6 or 7 quarters? If you can't, I'm gonna have to pass on that idea. =\

Re:Invest for the long-term

[Squalish]

You can also see the other end of this.

• Given that there are temporary measures an officeholder can take to push back major forseeable crises.
• Given that these measures improve the immediate situation and deepen the intensity and inevitability of said crisis
• Given that we have elected an officeholder who's not motivated by pure benevolence towards his constituents, and is self-interested in immediate popularity/power.
• And given that this officeholder is term limited.

What motivation does this officeholder have not to set everything up so that it comes crashing down six months after he's out of office? This is in regards to budget problems, and wider than that, fiscal, monetary, and trade problems. Is it possible to avoid an officeholder using the quick (eventually disasterous) fixes available to him?

Bush/Greenspan's ticking timebomb appears to have sparked early, and we've crested the top of the hill - the dollar is accelerating downwards of its own accord now. Where will it stop, nobody knows.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[delt0r]

I honestly thought thats what they were doing. At least in NZ and here thats what they do, why would the do anything else? The Problem is that the conduit is owned by the company and they charge a lot to let others use it.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[Belial6]

Here in the US they don't do conduit at all. The reason they don't is because it is cheaper cheaper to just run the cables, and the only way you will get developers to spend an extra dime is if it mandated by the city/county. While it sounds like NZ has the problem half solved, allowing the company to own the conduit is only slightly better in practice than letting them bury their cables directly. (By the way, when we are saying conduit, we are not talking about a protective sheathing, but are talking about a large tube that new cable can be pulled through.)

Re:Invest for the long-term

[delt0r]

but are talking about a large tube that new cable can be pulled through. Of course. The local government own quite big ones down the main street. The min size ones are pretty small IIRC, 3/4 inch or something...

Re:Invest for the long-term

[LinuxDon]

Quote: "by spending 2x as much now, we're saving 20x as much over the next n years."
Because usually in a few years the (now quite new) technology becomes 4 times cheaper and two times faster.

Also, the bottleneck of the bandwidth isn't the last mile. With ADSL2+ you can establish a 24Mbit connection without any additional infrastructure costs, but who has one at this moment? (I do, although I also would have been satisfied with half the speed)
Usually, the main problem is carriers ripping you off and not the last mile! And you are not going to solve that problem by deploying an extremely expensive new infrastructure. And btw, the digging costs 10.000,- per kilometer. Who do you think will have to pay the bill?
What the consumer wants is fiber optic speeds for less money than the copper connection (already there) costs, which (commercially) is just an insane and unworkable wish. And -that- is why fiber to the home does not work at this moment.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[walt-sjc]

Yeah - many of them were too early.

Even if you were on the path of dark fiber, it was very expensive to hook up. I had a few buildings in San Francisco that had dark fiber from several companies in the street out front. Getting it hooked up was a 6 month $100,000 effort (for a Metro Area Network) plus recurring (back around 2000.) The city, tired of having all the streets ripped up all the time, made things VERY difficult. That was problem 1.

So let's look at the long-haul dark fiber. Problem 2 was that the need didn't exist because high speed to the last mile did not exist in any meaningful way. It's getting better with FiOS and other projects, but VERY few telcos are doing more than plain ADSL which is severely distance limited, rather than using new DSL technologies that can provide 10 times the bandwidth over the same wires much farther. Some can be repeated too.

Problem 3 is that the existing copper is frequently VERY old. They have been tapped into hundreds of times over the years, have load coils, bridge taps, are too narrow of guage for high speed, and frequently get flooded when it rains. I was talking with a local tech the other day for a noise problem and he told me that many of the lines from the CO to the neighborhood were well over 50 years old. The infrastructure needs to be replaced anyway, so it may as well be replaced with fiber - even if it is fiber fed DLC/DSLAM's for now, and fiber to the home / small business later.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[UnknowingFool]

We did invest for the long term. Telecommunications Act of 1996 provided that ISPs, telecoms, phone companies, etc. could charge customers special surcharges and receive some tax credits in exchange for building a new high speed infrastructure like fiber. For the last decade they have received $200 billion and we still have no fiber. Those who get fiber have to pay for the privilege.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[failedlogic]

I agree, but I'd go further by proposing that an expenditure of fiber to the home could -save- money on infrastructure. Many people are opting not to commute to work and work from the home. The problem with working from home (I've not had the experience) is that many have to still commute to the office to attend meetings. Having a faster Internet connection throughout a given city would allow persons to stay at home and teleconference with video and voice in great quality.

Assuming that most businesses would agree to having its staff work from home and we can find was to ensure productivity remains high. We wouldn't need as much public transit or investment in roads. My city is a small-sized one and it spends over $500 million on road and public transit alone. I'm sure this figure would come darn close to wiring the whole city with fiber optic.

And if productivity remains high and time is saved commuting, we spend more time with our families rather than "wasting" 30-60 minutes commuting to work each day.

Re:Invest for the long-term

[ThousandStars]

This actually sounds like a very good idea -- do you know of any municipalities that have actually installed such a system? I ask because it also sounds like a system that would be harder to implement than it sounds, as how would one actually move cable from place to place? How would it scale from one house to hundreds or thousands? And although we call it the "last mile," it could be as long as five or ten miles from the telco's box to the house.

Anyhow, thanks for the insightful post, which was actually moderated correctly!

Re:Invest for the long-term

[Belial6]

Unfortunately, I have not heard of any municipalities that have implemented this, and I'm not sure that there are not other... 'factors' that would keep it from being implemented even if it turned out to be the obvious answer. No doubt planning would be needed, and the idea would need to be fleshed out, but my thought would be that the conduit would be along the lines of our storm drain systems. Many of these are large enough for a grown man to walk in if he haunches over, and they have access every 300 feet or so. Add a 3" or 4" off shoot that terminates at the residence property line, and you have your basic system laid out. If storm drains can be kept clear, cables could be pulled through a similar system. Heck, if it were not for the debris getting tangled in the lines, I would suggest that municipalities use the existing storm drain system.

Basically, most cities already have 3 conduit systems that they manage just fine. Sewer, water, and storm drains. While a forth conduit system is handled by the gas company. Having one more conduit system that does not involve moving water or feces around just cannot be that hard, and it certainly could handle greater leakage than the fresh water or gas lines.

Installation cost

[RedWizzard]

Is the cost of the cable really that relevant? I thought it was the cost of installing the cable that was the major stumbling block.

Re:Installation cost

[memrob]

I think you're correct - cable itself isn't the greatest expense - even the custom ends on the cables are fairly cheap, though more expensive than with copper as they are a bit finicky. But the installation is the expensive part. Civil utilities are installed in new subdivisions by government contractors by the local city or county in most places, but television cable and phone lines? I'm not so sure who foots the bill for that infrastructure. This doesn't even mention that installing new fiber in already existing subdivisions of single family homes has got to be expen$ive for sure. Telco and cable monopolies have little incentive to upgrade existing infrastructure in the last mile until current infrastructure has inadequate bandwidth for content. They're already running into some bandwidth contention during peak hours, which is why they are increasingly using throttling techniques and traffic shaping (like the forged RTS packets my own provider, Comcast, has recently gained so much noteriety for). That has turned out to be problematic for public relations and will rapidly provide diminishing returns, but I don't expect cable providers and telcos to do much until they absolutely are forced to do so. Adding customers adds to monthly cashflow; redeploying infrastructure doesn't. I suggest an actuarial decision will drive the deployment: When paid HD content outgrows the existing pipe in the last mile, the providers will build the infrastructure they need to reap those new revenues. So I expect content, not Internet traffic, will be the driver for the deployment.

Fiber faster than copper? Ummm....no

[cafucu]

While not as fast as glass fiber, it is significantly faster than copper. Not quite, since speed =/= bandwidth. Fiber can provide more bandwidth than copper because lasers can light fiber up and turn it off quickly without a problem, whereas electrical charges on a conductor tend to hang around for a bit. But the actual delay from source to destination is faster on copper. Again, speed =/= bandwidth.

Re:Fiber faster than copper? Ummm....no

[BlueParrot]

Eh? Are you concerned about the speed of the light pulse in the cable? In that case let us just say that you are going to need a REALLY fancy cable to get any relevant improvements...

Re:Fiber faster than copper? Ummm....no

[cafucu]

Eh? Are you concerned about the speed of the light pulse in the cable? In that case let us just say that you are going to need a REALLY fancy cable to get any relevant improvements... No, I'm not concerned about the speed of the light pulse in this case. Obviously the bandwidth capabilities of fiber make it more suitable than copper for some applications. I'm just pointing out that fiber is not faster than copper. It provides more bandwidth, but the physical medium is actually slower.

Slashdotters are supposed to be a little pedantic, right? :^)

Re:Fiber faster than copper? Ummm....no

[Anonymous Coward]

Digging around, standard CAT5 ethernet cables seem to have a velocity factor of around 0.66 due to good ol' transmission line effects. Fiber optics are shooting through glass which has an index of refraction of n=1.5 ish, which causes the velocity of light in it to drop into the same ballpark (c/1.5 => .66c). In terms of actual propogation delays, they're comparable. The big benefit is that the fiber doesn't have to deal with all the varied and ugly(near, far, alien) crosstalk and other noise that the electrical signals have to deal with. If you add this into the required delays, fiber probably comes out ahead. Keep in mind that every gigabit ethernet chip has a mess of DSP processing happening inside; I don't even dare to think about what the 10G chips are doing.

Re:Fiber faster than copper? Ummm....no

[agingell]

Also with CAT5/6 you have to untwist some of the cable when you use connectors which affects the cable velocity due to the change in effective dielectric, whereas with fibre you really only get an attenuation as the joins are not in-line, the length of material change(glue) is small in comparison to a few tens of mm for a CAT cable plug and patch.

Re:Fiber faster than copper? Ummm....no

[InvalidError]

I'm just pointing out that fiber is not faster than copper. It provides more bandwidth, but the physical medium is actually slower.

It depends on what type of fiber and coax you are comparing. Wavelength and frequency are also factors in determining the propagation speed. For fiber, multi-mode 50um core fiber is faster than 62.5um and both are slower than single-mode (typically less than 6.25um core) fibers, 1.6um IR propagates faster than 1.1um IR, etc. Coax is basically a waveguide so the same general rules apply... larger cables have slower propagation and lower frequencies propagate faster. On top of physical dimensions (cable/fiber geometry) and signal spectrum, cable construction materials' electrical and optical properties (mainly dielectric constant for coax and refraction index for fiber) will also have considerable effect on propagation speed and bandwidth.

Single-mode fiber has much faster propagation speeds and higher bandwidth than multi-mode fiber but is considerably more expensive in every way so most of the fiber used for GbE-class sub-3km runs today is 50um multi-mode. It's not like anybody would ever notice the few microseconds difference between the fastest coax and slowest fiber... the process of (de-)modulating light is much faster and straight-forward than DSP-based QAM (de-)modulation on DOCSIS modems/CMTS or ADSL2+ modems/DSLAM so fiber has a 100+ microseconds latency advantage here that easily offsets slower "last-mile" multi-mode fiber propagation to nearby aggregation equipment. From there, ADSL (CO/remote), coax (HFC box) and pure-fiber networks become practically the same.

Re:Fiber faster than copper? Ummm....no

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like you fucktard? You are so fucking mentaly slow it is so fucking pathetic fucktard.

-BlueParrot
Wow. You're an angry parrot. Try Prozac.

Wrong summary

[ihavnoid]

The research group is mentioned to be in "Korea Institute of Science and Technology", which is better known as KIST here in Korea, isn't a company. It is a government research agency.

Re:Wrong summary

[novakyu]

Er, isn't it KAIST? I remember because "KIST" sounds like some bad mispronounciation of KISS.

The last mile problem isn't technical

[Anonymous Coward]

The abysmal state of what passes for "broadband" in the US has nothing to do with a lack of network technology for connecting the last mile.

This is a layer 1 solution to a layer 8 and 9 problem.

Flexible Cables Means...

[Quartz25]

Distorting information became so much easier.

Last mile...

[Usquebaugh]

My understanding is that the last mile problem is all to do with the cost of laying wire not the cost of the wire itself. Also, if everybody has gigabit connections the cable provider is going to have to invest in some very serious switching and upstream connections. In short fixing the last mile will probably only expose problems up stream.

I keep wondering about god playing dice and quantum entanglement. Currently, the labs are stuck at a few miles. But if they can up the range and speed would this not be a better solution. A cable of infinite length that is also secure that you can give to any ISP. ISP would be an open market and speeds would go up as costs went down. No need for cable/wireless so zero installation costs.

So is QE going to happen or is it just my poor grasp of the subject matter?

Re:Last mile...

[Comen]

I agree with this, this problem of the last mile is BS, and always has been, also people comparing us to countries that have faster connections to the house is BS.
Most those Asian countries have lots of density, and that makes it easier to connect people as higher rates. If you connect lots of apartments by puting local switches and ethernet that is easier to give people faster connections.
DSL2+ can do up to around 25Mb down, that is allot, and new specs are going to provide 100Mb probably more soon, but like with most DSL that kind of speed drops off quickly the further you get from the DSLAM, its a fast drop off, so its get to were if you are not really close you get same speeds as old dsl.
The telephone company I work for can provide up to 25Mb to your house via DSL, they sell up to 10Mb, why they dont offer the full 25Mb? Hmmmm well because thats crazy, not only has out bandwidth doubled every year out to the internet, we have to pay for that bandwidth also, its not free. we provide bussiness with 10Mb fiber ethernet links (MetroE) mostly only use 4-5Mb of that during the day, I know allot fo the people here could figure out ways to use what ever amount they can give you, but you can not be the worlds server and server and download eveything all day for free.
So when people talk about people in Japan getting 1Gig connection, its not like we can not provide that also, now via ethernet switches in a apartment complex just like anywhere else, but are we sure they sell that full bandwidth to the customer? if I was running ethernet to a switch for customers in a apartment, I would probably not give everyone 1gig either, unless it was to let them copy files between each other that fast, like on a local LAN, but out to the net there is still going to be bottle necks.
There is a big difference between what you can technicaly do, and what you are actully selling people, it has to scale.
At some point there has to be a bottle neck going from Japan outside the local japanese telcos network. Bandwidth is cheap within your own network, it does not cost me as much to provide large bandwidth between customers on my own network. but when they tranverse to other networks besides mine, its costs me.
We also provide FTTX, at speeds at around 75Mb down (GPON) think the ACTIVE-E connections might be faster than that, this is good, but even then we offer 10Mb of that bandwidth for Internet, the rest is for, voice services (pots), and video services (TV).
Again though I do not see issues with the last mile, we can get speeds to the customers, thie issues are higher up in the network between providers, and even then I am guessing we are further ahead than other countries, its just that allot of those countries have 1 telecom provider, I know China does, and providing more bandwidth between its own custoemrs is cheaper, than out to the rest of the world, I really think you have to look at the whole picture here, not the articles about the how fast the last mile is to some people apartments in china or japan or something.
The problems with the last mile in the USA is a problem with people being allot more spread out, I dont not care were you go, if you live out in the middle of no where, its costs more to get you a good connection, it costs to run the cable out to bum fuck.
The company I work for is semi rural, and they have fiber out in areas I never thought there would be fiber, but the fiber feeds copper DSLAMS, because running fiber between homes out there is not reasonable yet, still its a toss of a coin if you are close enough to a dsl2+ dslam to get 25Mb down, you maybe get 10Mb, or even 6Mb. but this is because you live in a different layout than in a big city, where everything is on top of each other.
I have friends I work with that have 15Mb down to their house now, we would not sell that speed, but since they work there, they tweek it. I am not lucky enough to live in my companies area, so I pay another telecom to give me 6Mb down, I know they are doing DSL2+ to my modem, but only are selling that

Re:Last mile...

[jrcamp]

In short fixing the last mile will probably only expose problems up stream.

How do you think progress is made? At any given point in time there will be one bottleneck in a system. Things progress by removing the bottlenecks one by one. You fix the slowest part and then move on to the next slowest part. Over time, the system as a whole evolves to become faster as its parts do.

If it exposes problems upstream then great! It means we have removed a bottleneck and the next worst one will be fixed. Otherwise companies will just say "well there's no demand from consumers so we don't need to improve our infrastructure."

Re:Last mile...

[mux2000]

So is QE going to happen or is it just my poor grasp of the subject matter?

For the home user, not for a very long time. QE is used for key exchange only,because it has a pityful bandwidth (in bits/sec), and requires very specialized hardware, as well as extremely protected conditions. Also, unless Quantum Computing becomes widely available, there is absolutely no advantage of QE over regular (PGP, HTTPS etc.) encryption, if it's done right. Moreover, QE will only guarantee safe communications point-to-point, which means it would likely end at your local internet switch, which gives you very little protection. Taking all this into consideration I would say it will take several decades for QE to become as widespread as broadband currently is.

Re:Last mile...

[Usquebaugh]

The issue is not that upstream can be fixed but that you are still tied to a single provider.

Re:Last mile...

[Usquebaugh]

Bandwidth is limited by how quickly we can switch the state of the entangled particle. I'm figuring we've only just begun to look at this and a many fold increase is possible.

Re:Last mile...

[kmac06]

There is a current advantage of quantum encryption. The information passed that is encrypted using a one-time pad (which is how QE works) can never be decrypted. If you listen in on a RSA encrypted communication, you can store that and then decrypt it in 50+ years, if the technology were available. Also, QE can be used with a sort of "repeater" (or a chain of such repeaters), with a third party operating said repeater, without compromising security.

TFA misses the point

[timmarhy]

It's not the cable itself that's expensive, it's laying it.

Re:TFA misses the point

[rmerry72]

It's not the cable itself that's expensive, it's laying it.

Just like hookers really :->

Wow!

[SailorSpork]

You mean I can get internet porn even faster with these plastic rope thingys? Sign me up!

Better idea

[ILuvRamen]

What's wrong with copper? I'd freakin love even 100 MBPS at my house! That's like a minute and a half for a good quality DVD movie instead of hours. And copper can do gigabit so geeze. They just need more of it and better network switches and routers instead of cheaping out and giving crap service to everyone to save a buck

Re:Better idea

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Fiber propogates much longer distances and easier. Your 10/100 ethernet is only up to (IIRC) 100 meters. The same goes to gigabit, but that's even touchier.

Re:Better idea

[felix9x]

Thats why when Verison gets over to your house and wires it up with fiber your cable company is not only going to drop your rates but also triple your download and upload.

Re:Better idea

[zippthorne]

Brilliant, and with everyone else switching to FIOS, they won't even have to lay new copper!

Re:Better idea

[Anarchitect_in_oz]

That's really only and issue because old switching equipment was hugh, i mean the stuff took up vast amounts of building space.
So cables run all the way to the exchange and sure they stop in a couple of places and get tied in to other cables to continue the journey.

These days the switches can be very small, i'm sure you could fit a switch in the same space of the junction boxes.

So are the Junction boxes more than a 100m if so how hard in most places would it be to add extra junction boxes then treat each junction box as a switch instead of bring it all the way back to the exchange.

Fibre all these new switches in a big mesh and you have a pretty wide network then agian you might have just made latency the issue instead.

In urban areas this might be a good plan, you have lots of consumers in range junction boxes you have more in buildings with enough space already dedicated to have their own switch. You have underserviced demand. Oh and the biggest factor the old exchange which will soon be empty is probably sitting on a very valuable bit of land in the centre of town.

Re:Better idea

[flatulus]

Several problems with your comments:

1) The 100m range for copper Ethernet is over Category 5 or better twisted pair wiring, and requires two (for 10/100Mbit) or four (1 Gbit) pairs of wires to carry the Ethernet signal. Residences are wired with Category 3, and seldom are more than two pair. And being Category 3, they aren't twisted or insulated to the necessary degree to carry even 10 Mbit Ethernet reliably.

2) Your "junction boxes" have existed for decades. They are called SLC (Subscriber Loop Carrier) or DLC (Digital Loop Carrier) -- look them up on Wikipedia.

3) Central office sizes have already been substantially reduced. That real estate has already been sold off.

4) Switches (telephone switches that is) do not easily "remote" out to where the "junction boxes" (SLC/DLC) are located. Switches include all kinds of accounting equipment, network management equipment, the "routing tables" (i.e. dial this sequence of digits to send your call down this circuit to another switch somewhere else), etc. While it is technically feasible to put all of this in a "junction box", it is still more economical to keep it all in the traditional "switching office" for logistical reasons if nothing else.

But in any case, you clearly have the right idea. You just didn't know that it was already thought of, and exploited, to the technical limit (the CAT5 wiring requirement for Ethernet being the "limit").

Cheers....

Re:Better idea

[ILuvRamen]

I just got upped to 7 megabits on road runner from 5 lol. Too bad I'M ONLY GETTING 1-2 AT ANY TIME OF THE DAY! And before you're all like oh you've got ______ the reply is no lol. No networking problems, bad cabling, or spyware. I spent days troubleshooting those already. It's RR's fault.

If the last mile matters

[ThousandStars]

There's a reasonable chance wireless will eventually solve many of the last mile problems; I recently cancelled Millennium Cable in Seattle for ClearWire instead. Right now it isn't available everywhere and the service isn't particularly fast by fiber standards, as its 1.5 down /756 (I think) up. But if the technology improves faster than fiber can be rolled out we might not care by the time 2011 rolls around.

Re:If the last mile matters

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a reasonable chance wireless will eventually solve many of the last mile problems; I recently cancelled Millennium Cable in Seattle for ClearWire instead.

I agree wireless has potential, but if ClearWire is any indication, we're doomed. They're infamous for having some of the world customer service known to man and for stupid transfer limits and extreme packet filtering ("everything except web and email"), for example. I live in Seattle and I won't go near them. Their webpage contains outright lies about their competitors.

Right now it isn't available everywhere and the service isn't particularly fast by fiber standards, as its 1.5 down /756 (I think) up. But if the technology improves faster than fiber can be rolled out we might not care by the time 2011 rolls around.

If 1.5/768 was the worst part, we'd be in great shape. Unfortunately, in 2011 we'll probably have 150Mbps down ... and the same 768Kbps up, same monthly transfer quota, still web and email only, and the same craptacular customer service.

Re:If the last mile matters

[Geek-tan]

Given that most locations still need a lot more work for faster connections, be it physical or wireless, it does indeed look like wireless is the quick-and-somewhat-painless alternative to not having to install cabling. Though by a constant gamer's standards, wireless isn't as reliable as cabling, even though it's nice for the whole pop and go, check your e-mail, see who's in the game, kind of thing. The reliability issues don't come up often and can be resumed fairly quick, but they do come up more than a physical connection does. If and when the issue of reliability is fixed, there is also another issue in that even when locked and encrypted, wireless connections are a whole lot easier to detect, intercept, and distort.

Peopel always missunderstand quantum...

[BlueParrot]

Using quantum interactions to transmit information also requires you to transmit a signal the old fashion way. This is essentially what prevents you from exceeding the speed of light. You would also need a way to distribute the entangled particles ( each pair can be used only once ). The advantage of quantum entanglement is completely down to its ability to transfer quantum states ( no set of classical information can completely describe a quantum mechanical system ) and it's security against eavesdropping and brute force attacks

Now, contrary to popular belief a man in the middle attack is still possible. That you are exchanging pairs of entangled particles rather than exchanging large integers doesn't matter. You still have to be careful about who you accept keys ( or particles ) from.

Re:Peopel always missunderstand quantum...

[Usquebaugh]

My understanding is that the fiber optic is only necessary for the entanglement. Once entangled the fiber is not required.

The one time use is a problem, but I think the entanglement remains even after resolution of the state so maybe changing state again will cause the other particle to change. This I've never seen stated anywhere only hinted at.

Re:Peopel always missunderstand quantum...

[kmac06]

Man in the middle attack is not possible in quantum encryption if you can verify that information is being passed without modification (but not necessarily privately) through a classical channel to/from the correct party. Not sure if that's what you were saying or not, but I just thought I'd clarify.

This isn't news at all!

[Anonymous Coward]

The article writers and poster have no idea what they are talking about. Unfortunately most of us fiber scientists & engineers got laid off during the tech crash.

Plastic fiber has been around for decades. It is cheap. The problem with plastic fiber is that your signal won't go as far as with a glass fiber. However, for "last-mile" use, you don't need to worry about signal loss since you aren't going very far. The big cost in "last-mile" is digging up the ground and putting in the cable/conduit/fiber. The cost of the fiber is negligible compared to getting right-of-way and the cost of labor.

The cost of the fiber is so low, that normally when you dig up the ground to put in fiber, you put in lots & lots of fiber (since it is so cheap), just in case you need it in the future. This is called dark fiber, and there are millions of miles of dark fiber all over North America (from the tech boom) that used to belong to dotcom upstarts & their venture capitalists.

And as for bending fiber, you can always bend fiber. When you make very thin glass or plastic fibers for optical purposes, they are flexible. Has everything been running in straight lines?! Idiots.

Now, there is minimum bend radius for fiber, and if you bend your fiber beyond that, then you start to get some loss. Normally this isn't a problem, and you can't bend the fiber that far anyway - fiber has a cladding & outer sheath (which varies depending on the application indoor/buried/underwater), which limits the amount of bend, preventing bend loss.

Hate to burst your bubble...

[daBass]

...but Trench Warfare came of age in the American Civil War, particularly a the Siege of Petersburg.

right from the outset

[rice_burners_suck]

They should run many in parallel right from the outset to, say, quadruple the throughput. This is because although the investment will be much larger in the short run, in the long run, it will save money, since it will put off the need to upgrade to yet higher throughput systems, which will save in switching costs. Not to mention that installation of the cable is probably more expensive than the cable itself.

As a previous customer...

[milsoRgen]

...of ClearWire LLC. I can only wish you the best of luck! While I have heard that Seattle has seen substantially better speeds then what I ever saw, I still feel for you. You see I live outside of Boise, Idaho. 3rd largest city in the United States' Pacific Northwest. And well... shucks. Let's just say the first 3 months were great....

Re:As a previous customer...

[ThousandStars]

Thanks for the heads up. I'm only signed up for six months, but the big issue for me was price: it's about $25 less than cable, and, in addition, Millenium was never responsive when the line went myteriously dead and such. Oh, and it also galled me that cable TV was only $15 or so more per month, compared to $50 or so as a standalone package -- but I don't have a TV (sorry to be this guy) and felt like they were jerking me around. Yes, I know you want to cell me bundles, but I have zero use for one and don't want to be part of your marketing ploy.

So far the dl/ul speeds are pretty good, and I haven't noticed the 6 - 9 p.m. slowdown that used to occur. This may become a bigger problem as more people sign up. I do live in Seattle, about a mile from downtown, so if anywhere in the city is going to get good connections it ought to be people in my area.

I'm sorry to hear the abysmal stories about ClearWire but am not especially surprised by them, given how low their nominal competition sets the bar. I can only hope the competition from ClearWire improves cable service, much as mobiles made landline telecos moderately more responsive and satellite TV forced cable companies to improve their offerings, if not their service.

Nothing new, move along

[besalope]

Corning (division of Pyrex and one of the main glass fiber optic manufacturers) already announced their flexible glass fiber optic shielded with nanostructures back in July. http://www.corning.com/media_center/press_releases/2007/2007072301.aspx

Try the last 20 miles.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is never going to happen. I live less than 20 miles from a town of over 300000 people and they won't even lay coax out here. (ADSL is useless with its extremely limited range)

Last mile my ass. Wireless and satellite are useless for gaming. Good old fashioned analog modems connecting at 28.8 Kbps is the best internet connection that most of North America will ever see. That is the fact of the matter.

The focus needs to be on elimination of high bandwidth crap that makes the internet nearly unusable for the majority of its users. Unfortunately, few web developers can grasp this concept and are losing out on huge sections of the market.

In addition, I have been using fiber optic connections between analytical instruments with a bending radius of 5.3 cm for decades, I can't see the need for less than that. If you need to bend fiber connections more sharply than that (especially in scale of miles), then you have serious design issues. Fiber has been very flexible for ages, this is totally bogus, not to mention totally unnecessary, and totally moot, as it will never happen anyway and fiber flexibilty has nothing to do with it.

Wireless is just not my favorite,

[falconwolf]

if I had my preference I would take wired over wireless anyday

Just as with phone service, I only have a cellphone, I'd take wireless over wired. That way I can take it with me. I've got cable now but given the chance, if my ISP were to offer broadband wireless, I'd take that so long as it didn't cost too much. Of course I could make more use of it than some others would. Next year I hope to get into photography and with WiMax or some other wireless broadband using a Digital SLR and my laptop I could upload photos to a server while out in the field.

Falcon

2,5 G ?

[minimum]

I wonder where they pull the 2,5G upper limit number? In fibre, the most important properties are attenuation (at specific wavelengths) and dispersion. Both properties determine basically, what's the distance you can shine the light through the cable. Current G... whatever standard fibres have quite specific attenuation: very low at 1500nm area and somewhat less lower at 1300nm. Respectively long-haul and short-haul. Rest of the waveleghts are basically unusable.
Using DWDM one can multiplex many wavelengths into a single pair of fibre, delivering hundreds of Gbits over long distances. This is where the dispersion comes into a play - different wavelengths travel at different speeds.

Re:2,5 G ?

[GonHiDi]

The concept of having only two transmission windows at 1300 and 1500 is getting outdated with better manufacturing processes (that lead to the so called dry-fibers) that do a better job of minimizing the presence of those disruptive water ions that peaked the attenuation between those two windows. One now hears about transmission bands, which span the range between and including the two "classical" transmission windows.

10G over copper

[enoz]

Why bother digging up all those trenches when you can keep the copper and get your 10G, so they say.

Re:10G over copper

[ajlitt]

Did you even read the link you posted? The part is for CAT5E or CAT6 WITH A RANGE OF LESS THAN 15 METERS. Oh right, this is /.

Re:10G over copper

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading through the other comments here you might be forgiven for thinking twisted pair phoneline and twisted pair CAT5 are the same thing.

Just how bendable?

[Dannkape]

so, just how bendable are these new cables compared to old ones? Can't find any numbers on that in the article. Here in Norway, they have installed fiber into private homes for a few years now. The outdoor cable can bend radius of 20cm (8in), and once the thick plastic shell is peeled off for indoor use it can handle 2-3cm (1in) bends. I haven't found any theoretical speed limits for the cables yet, but they say it should be good enough for decades. (At the moment they only offer speeds up to 50/25mbit, but that seems to be more because they don't want their backbones breaking under the insane P2P load... And the router/brigde seems to be only 100mbit on the LAN plug)

nanostructures...

[advocate_one]

marketing buzzword for "magic pixie dust"...

Agreed and Confirmed.

[statemachine]

I work with plastic fiber every single day. You can bend it around your pinky and still get 4Gb/s or even 10Gb/s out of it. For short-haul distances, 300m or less, it works just fine. Is this article from 10 years ago? For some reason, this is reminding me of how Microsoft touted shortcuts as something new when UNIX had symlinks (and got them right) decades before.

The parent needs to be modded up.

Bribe money...

[denzacar]

Is not spent on pr0n young grasshopper.

It is spent on prostitutes.
And mistresses. And gifts for your wife and girlfriend so they will look away.

HOW MUCH DOES IT COST?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Blagh, do tell where to pick this up as well.

Sigh

[WindBourne]

First, I remind you of that 640K memory is ENOUGH for anybody. The simple fact is that if a couple of Gigs were available in most homes, then the apps would show up. The real advantage of using plastic fiber is that it bends easily and will almost certainly be cheaper than copper. Currently, copper is shooting up in price and is going to go MUCH higher in the coming year (china is trying to corner the market on it, and the dollar is plummeting, while the only new find of it was in tibet). So all that is needed is to make the connection cheap. Well, this is plastic, not glass. Almost certainly SOMEBODY is going to make cheap connectors. I would also guess that nics and switchs would plummet in prices once fiber goes into homes.

Re:Sigh

[Velcroman98]

Arizona (the Copper State) had a new strike a couple years back near Globe and Miami. I don't know if this new ore strike, very close to an old mine, can be considered a "new find" or not. The higher prices have made it once again affordable to open a few of the mines that had closed years back. It's definitly going to be good for the area (the dusty area featured in the shitty Sean Penn movie U-Turn). http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20070429/ai_n19051147 http://www.theminingnews.org/news.cfm?newsID=1777 http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/0214carlota14.html http://www.fortheretarded.com/?p=404 So, should we run Corning's flexible fiber to the house and plastic inside? I'd like to build in a few years, and I'm amazed how many of the new builds today are getting wired.

Re:Sigh

[Firethorn]

First, when did I mention that gigabit would be enough for anybody?
Second, I put a timeline on cat6 - 15 years. That means that I figure new installations will be rare in 10, semi-obsolete in 15, legacy in 20. Please note that I said 'unusably obsolete', this is a much different standard than 'don't need more'.

The simple fact is that if a couple of Gigs were available in most homes, then the apps would show up
Cat6 will support 'a couple of gigs' rather easily.

As for my estimate, consider: 10base2 was designed in 1985. 10baseT was 1990. It is still used today, 17 years later, although rarely. 100BaseT came in 1995 - and still dominates the market 12 years later. 1999 saw the standard set for gigabit over copper - only in the last year or so have we seen the introduction of consumer level gigabit switches. Rather than buying gigabit switches people are buying 802.11 wireless products, mostly G* at this point (54 mbit half duplex MAX), combined with some vender specific dual channel stuff giving you 108mbit theoretical max, still half duplex.

So I think that a rough guess of 15 years before it becomes 'legacy'(IE support is rare, expensive, or unavailable), is not out of line.

*Draft N is faster in at least some conditions, but doesn't play as nicely with others nearby(dual channel operation, when there's only 3 nonoverlapping channels). This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't that I've only seen two products that take advantage of the fact that the draft N standard allows the usage of the 802.11a 5ghz channels.

Re:Sigh

[WindBourne]

Yeah, they are finding new strikes, but they are all pretty small (though the one in tibet was not). The NAS (and I believe even NSA contributed to it) seems to believe that we will run out of new copper very shortly. Basically, plastic will go down in price once we quit using oil/gas for energy. Considering that it is data, there is no real reason to have copper.

I bought my first home in 1996. I asked the builder about pulling cat5. He said that they never did it because cat3 was plenty fast for everybody. I later ran conduit in the walls (2nd floor to the attic (3/4"), 1st floor to the basement, and 1 large 2" from the basement to the attic). Inside, I then ran 3 cat 5, and 2 rg6's (save the house chase, where I ran multiples to the basement). In my current home, it had some cat5, but I added more in various rooms. If I can suggest, try to do something similar, but keep it simplier. In particular, do not use conduit unless you need to. If you are on the outside wall, then yes, use it (too much insulation to get around. But on the inside walls, simply use a framed opening without the box. Also make each a double ganger box. You can buy cover plates that cover either both or 1/2 of it. Chances are that you will not need all of them, but you will be happy if you do.

If you install cat* now, you can always add fiber in the future. The problem with it was pointed out; it is still expensive AT THIS TIME. It will get cheap, if we continue to have innovations like plastic fiber (which will no doubt lead to cheap connectors).

bending fiber

[CaptYossarian]

i dont know too much about the difference between civvy fiber and the milspec stuff, but i know ive tied knots in the stuff i trained with and had no real signal loss. fusion splicing has negligible losses too, and its just a button push from two separate fibers to flawless junction. so really, whats the deal? tactical fiber isnt that hard to handle, its just bigger.

I am overjoyed...

[rebewt]

Cheaper fiber, thats great. However I expect to see it rolled out in my area (Milwaukee) around ... ohhhh I don't know - maybe the day after pigs fly? The sad reality is that the telco's will continue to squeeze every last day out of the existing rotting copper network to increase their profits. Then on the day they just can't get any more blood from the turnip they will jack service prices in the name of "upgrading and expanding their infastructure".

So...

[Nom du Keyboard]

So, just as cable responds to current fiber installations with DOCSIS 3, fiber leaps ahead again. They're just making it easier and easier to get rid of Comcast.

Less EMT = cheaper buildouts

[jhRisk]

Bear in mind the construction value to these innovations, too. For example, aesthetics is normally the primary driver in new office constructions and cabling has to work around it. Not a big deal except in situations like the Empire State Building where the ceiling heights are already low, Washington DC's codes restricting building heights, and other extenuating but not too uncommon scenarios where architects have to push the limits to "create space." This leaves us with very little room to work with just about everywhere, some areas that are sheet rocked over or otherwise completely inaccessible and other cabling challenges necessitating expensive EMT conduit. The tighter the space the more aesthetics drive the effort leaving little functional room thus increasing EMT conduit and other cabling costs. Granted some of it's needed anyway to protect cabling but others are to address the propensity for fibre to be pushed passed its restrictive bend limits. When dealing with spaces where the square footage is in the 5 figure area the savings are in the 6 figures!

Also, it allows us now to even consider fibre in these tight spaces as until now our basic approach has been to only consider fibre when the connection point distances warrant it.

In recent news?

[smooth wombat]

In related news, Corning recently announced

Recently announced? I've had the announcement about Cornings new fiber in my journal since August. See for yourself. It was never selected so I finally put it up so you folks could be informed.

I guess I shouldn't be too harsh on the folks running this site despite the dupes as they seem to have gotten around to fixing their mod point distribution system.

Fark snark

[Anonymous Coward]

WWI /obscure?

HDMI

[nmg196]

Does anybody have any idea why HDMI cables are copper, when with the bandwidths involved, you would think that a simple optical cable would be much better? When you're talking distances of a couple of meters max, even plastic kite line would probably work, so why to they keep making short cables out of copper? Even my 10 year old MiniDisc player supports an optical connection. If they'd made HDMI optical, then they probably wouldn't have had to make a new format of cable EVER.