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Will Fiber-To-the-Home Create a New Digital Divide?
First time accepted submitter dkatana writes Having some type of fiber or high-speed cable connectivity is normal for many of us, but in most developing countries of the world and many areas of Europe, the US, and other developed countries, access to "super-fast" broadband networks is still a dream. This is creating another "digital divide." Not having the virtually unlimited bandwidth of all-fiber networks means that, for these populations, many activities are simply not possible. For example, broadband provided over all-fiber networks brings education, healthcare, and other social goods into the home through immersive, innovative applications and services that are impossible without it. Alternatives to fiber, such as cable (DOCSYS 3.0), are not enough, and they could be more expensive in the long run. The maximum speed a DOCSYS modem can achieve is 171/122 Mbit/s (using four channels), just a fraction the 273 Gbit/s (per channel) already reached on fiber.
It won't.
It will simply widen the existing one.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Income inequality matters (particularly if you're trying to get elected) but how, exactly, is the difference between a cable modem and "ultra-fast broadband" going to change anyone's standard of living substantially? We're already at the point where there's very little food insecurity and housing insecurity in the US and Western Europe (and most of that is due to immigrant cultural problems). Does it really matter if your Netflix is in 4K v.s. SD?
I have been surprised in just the last few years how many full-time telecommuters I suddenly know, and equally surprised by how useful video-conferencing is in making my interactions with them more engaging, as opposed to just talking on the phone. So far, the experience is sub-optimal because there are frequent glitches and disconnects (whether it is the person's Internet connection, or our VPN, or Lync, I am not entirely sure). But the digital divide is no longer a notional idea for me, because I work daily with people who can't earn their living without a good connection.
My dad lives in rural Ontario, Canada. He has fiber to his house for $35 / month. Meanwhile, I live in one of the biggest cities in Canada and can't get fiber (Bell "fibe" is a joke).
So yeah, there's a divide. Just not the way you think.
I think the abbreviation you're looking for is DOCSIS, and you can easily bond more channels. My modem currently bonds 8 for downstream, and I saw Motorola has a model out that doubles that.
It is DOCSIS: Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification
The stupid cable companies will never do fiber to the home. they will use their monopolies to keep everyone at near dial up speeds on their crappy community loops, throttling heavy users (Netflix is what they consider heavy users), and making you life miserable when trying to use the web.
Fuck them.
Fiber is no panacea. It is still controlled by terrible ISP's that throttle reflexively and go cheap on the back haul. Frontier has made comments about offering much faster speeds over existing fiber connections, but only after Google started making serious noise about bringing in their own fiber option. The higher speeds were not available for purchase, so fiber gets us 20 Mb/s. It is not slow as such, but the speed offerings haven't changed in years, and to discussed 100 Mb/s is still just a press release to quell the masses. 20 Mb/s over fiber is just pretty lame as their best foot forward.
Name ONE use case other than streaming multiple 4K video channels which REQUIRES anything more than the 6.5Mbit/s connection I already have. Sure if you're serving up a large family you might want to spring for a couple of 20Mbit connections or something, but "need" FTTH?
Hardly.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
google can advertise 1gbps all they want but the truth is that if you're poor, a 5-10mbps connection is more than enough to get your kids watching educational shows on netflix and youtube. and torrentfreak had an article today about google drive and dropbox and onedrive throttling people on their end because most end points cannot support their user base at 1gbps per user. all the servers are virtualized and over subscribed in the cloud, they aren't built for performance.
i know people on 10mbps connections and their netflix comes in perfect HD because their ISP has an open connect appliance or a direct connection. staging the content close to the user and not streaming it via level 3 will do more for performance than paying for 100mbps or some ridiculous speed just to save 10 minutes on your steam downloads
it's like the PC market in 2001. the P4 is more than fast enough for anyone at the time
Assuming the existing companies will allow such a network to exist, what will we do with it?
The TPP is going to lock everything down, so our only choices are ultra-high speed access to what we already have on cable TV right now.
[End Of Line]
I live 40 miles southeast of Chicago. My community has access to high speed internet, but going much farther south or east, the options for faster-than-dialup services evaporate. Huge parts of the US aren't even served by 3G cell service or DSL lines, let alone cable internet. Let's solve that problem. It's far more important in the big picture than getting enough bandwidth to stream a dozen 4k streams for some theoretical 5% of the USA that has been gifted with fiber-based connectivity.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Hard to take an article seriously that can't even get basic details correct about the competitive technologies.
Aside from the few that have FiOS-like connections, the US doesn't have high-speed internet access; They have high-speed access to consume, but not to share or produce. The average consumer has just enough upstream to ACK the packets in a fully utilized down-stream with a little overhead for noise. This is not accidental.
The maximum speed a DOCSYS modem can achieve is 171/122 Mbit/s (using four channels), just a fraction the 273 Gbit/s (per channel) already reached on fiber.
According to this page, the DOCSYS 3.0 ARRIS/Motorola SB6183 and Netgear C6300 can handle 300 Mbit/s.
The SB6183 uses 6 download & 4 upload channels.
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The submitter must be addicted to technologies. I started with a 300 baud modem and I am happy with what I have today. I feel progress is catching up fast enough for my use case:
100mps/100mps for my data center
1.5mps/10 mps for my home connection
Total cost: 110$/month
Of course, give me more for the same price and I will take it but I wouldn't raise any issue with this.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Still a dream in many places in Brooklyn NY....
My home has no POTS and has a choice of either FTTP (fiber to the premises) or cable.
When we first moved in, I choose fiber... because it's fiber! It must be awesome.
AT&T fiber maxes out at 18Mbps and that it at a crazy unaffordable rate. Cheaper service from Comcast is 120Mbps.
It's not the physical medium that matters, it is the service and cost.
I'd do LTE if that had the best bang/buck.
Sorry, there are many legitimate worries about digital divide stuff, and there are even more about ISP business practices. But this red herring about your education being compromised because your video link is only 1080p, that's just stupid. Why not worry that rich people's cars accelerate faster than poor people's cars? Is that causing a "kinetic divide" that we now have to worry about? The difference between the "poor" 171/122 Mbit/s connection and the gigabit connections will basically turn out to be just as unimportant to society. Let's focus on solving the real social problems, which are still many.
there was never any digital divide. just people too lazy to learn how to use computers.
If internet at reasonable speeds (read: equivalent or greater than cell coverage) is affordable, then a digital divide based on internet speed will not exist.
You know people don't know what they're talking about when they refer to bandwidth as speed. Few people with broadband internet are maxing it out on a regular basis. The main problem is latency. Since generally it's just the last mile ( more likely ~100 feet) that's not fiber, you don't see a huge diference between media. Where you see a difference is in how far away your gateway is from the rest of the internet and how congested the links are.
It is DOCSIS, not DOCSYS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
With that said, no, it isn't going to create anymore of a divide than already exists. I have Brighthouse Cable, and I can get their 90mb plan for around $80/mo, but I am sticking with their 30mb plan that is bundled with their basic HD plan. Why? I used mrtg to monitor my usage and found that I wasn't taking advantage of the extra bandwidth. We (at least in the US) have no services that take advantage of the extra bandwidth. I can stream Netflix, Amazon, etc... in HD just fine. Granted, their idea of HD sucks, but that isn't the point. Before the MPAA found out about USENET (and I still want to find out who talked -- and beat them), I more than took advantage of the extra bandwidth, but now that USENET is gone (well, so neutered as to be useless for my purposes), I never find myself "waiting".
Now, what we need is more UPSTREAM bandwidth. I get 5mb up, and that is usable, but having 30/30 would be REAL nice.
With all that said, this is obviously *MY* use case scenario. I would love to hear from others in the US that need more than 30mb, and what you use it for / how you use it.
-- http://anonet.org -- The internet the way it was meant to be. Check it out, you may be surprised.
And then there's our overpriced and underperforming health delivery system. (Note: ACA/Obamacare is a part of the solution, not a part of the problem.) And our failing K-12 education, which is severely underfunded and strangling on bureaucracy.
Along with the steadily declining state level college/university systems. (And before the right wingers start screaming about foreign students, remember that they come from places where it's much harder to get into any school and a lot of the higher educations options are not as good as the US, even with our decline. Both public and private schools love out of country students because they pay full tuition.)
But it's all OK, because the upper 10%, and mostly the upper .01% and above are doing really good. For example six members of the Walton family had the same net worth as either the bottom 28% or 41% of American families combined (depending on how it is counted).
Of course historically low corporate tax levels have nothing to do with this, right?
So it it any wonder that the US is at best standing still, and more likely moving backwards when it comes to national infrastructure spending? And guess where the money goes?
Why is Snark Required?
"cable (DOCSYS 3.0), are not enough, The maximum speed a DOCSYS modem can achieve is 171/122 Mbit/s"
Ho-ly crap. This must have been by the most spoiled, self-centered, self-indulging, entitled little spoiled brat in California. You have no idea what life is like for 99.99% of the world, do you? Here's a clue - your housekeeper may well be a "one percenter". The other 99% (aka almost everyone) doesn't have Netflix and they don't have a computer. They have a small plot where they try to grow enough food to eat, and they have a need for shoes - not they want another $250 pair of Nikes, they have no shoes.
If 170 mbps just isn't enough for you and you're crying about it, you're seriously in need of some perspective. Go live like an average human for two weeks. Seriously, you need to go into your dad's reading room, spin the globe, and without looking stop it and put your finger in a random place. Get a big map of that country an toss a dart at the map to hit a random place. Then go there. Not to the nearest big city that you've heard of at a charity ball, but to the exact place where dart hit. Go there and find the closest person working. Do their work with them for two hours, then ask where is the NEAREST place you can rent a room. Not the nicest place, the nearest place. Don't reject the room just because it doesn't have a toilet, you're going to live like the average human for two weeks. When you get back, 170 Mbps will be more than enough. After you live like an average person for two weeks, your life back home will be so.awesome you'll never complainabout anything again.
Not having the virtually unlimited bandwidth of all-fiber networks means that, for these populations, many activities are simply not possible. For example, broadband provided over all-fiber networks brings education, healthcare, and other social goods into the home through immersive, innovative applications and services that are impossible without it.
I think this point requires further explaining.
Why exactly do I need Gbit service to bring healthcare into my home?
Alternatives to fiber, such as cable (DOCSYS 3.0), are not enough, and they could be more expensive in the long run. The maximum speed a DOCSYS modem can achieve is 171/122 Mbit/s (using four channels), just a fraction the 273 Gbit/s (per channel) already reached on fiber.
Huh?
DOCSIS 3.0 does not have a maximum limit on the number of channels that can be bonded.
The initial hardware would only bond up to 8 channels (~304 Mbit/s), but 16 channel (608 Mbit/s) hardware is already being rolled out by Comcast in the form of rebadged Cisco DPC3939 Gateways.
2015/2016 we might see 24 channel (912 Mbit/s) and 32 channel (1.2 Gbit/s) hardware.
2016/2017 is most likely, in the form of DOCSIS 3.1 modems, which use completely different modulation, but will have 24/32 channel DOCSIS 3.0 baked into them so that the ISPs can seamlessly upgrade from DOCSIS 3.0 to 3.1.
Cable's game plan is to use DOCSIS 3.1 to put off pulling fiber to the home, which keeps their costs low and will allow them to offer (multi)gigabit speeds using a hybrid fiber/co-ax infrastructure.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I chose your random location for you, using random.org to generate latitude and longitude. You're going to Savinki, Ukraine, where the average income is $405 / month. You'll get to meet some nice Russians while you're there. Enjoy your trip.
First of all it is DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification).
Secondly comparing the maximum bandwidth of a fiber line to a 4 channel DOCSIS 3 modem that is connected to the same wire as multiple other DOCSIS 3 modems is just ignorant. DOCSIS 3 can add more channels and have more bandwidth while also supporting more modems off the same line. The fiber you mention is a single point-to-point connection and probably costs 100 fold to deploy. Take that fiber and tell me how much it costs to create a setup with 4 channels grouped and each delivered independently to a neighborhood of 100 houses. Including the termination at each house. Fiber is not for individual households. Maybe in the future, but currently completely unnecessary. Especially when copper and wireless are the last foot.
You say DOCSIS alternatives will be more expensive in the long term. The only way they will be more expensive is if they become legacy and have to be maintained separately. Currently most of the infrastructure was already in place and re-used, so again your comparison is apples to oranges. Adding fiber costs a lot more, but can be cheaper in the long run if it is re-used and doesn't become a legacy system.
People without fiber are not losing out on "super-fast" broadband. 100+ Mbps is readily available and more than enough for most users.
In reality... (In the US) The problem is I can get 100+ Mbps yet my co-worker, living only about 20 miles from me can't even get DSL. He is stuck on fixed wireless that claims 10+ Mbps but averages 2Mbps. His provider is most likely sharing a single 10Mbps line with several customers. This is an issue. Broadband penetration is missing a lot of small areas which should be supplied with broadband. No one currently "needs" fiber. Cable and POTS lines can handle the bandwidth needs of just about anyone. They just need to be made available to everyone.
What speeds are really needed? I'd guess it depends on what a household uses Internet for and how many folks in the house will use it simultaneously. It seems to me we need to make it a national priority to get some kind of reasonable Internet speed in rural areas. Whether some areas have fiber to the home or some other technology that gives symmetrical Gigabit per second, in many areas dial up is the only thing available. Of course satellite or using a cell phone as a hot spot are possible but high cost and limited bandwidth aren't necessarily good choices. No video telephony or video streaming available there with dial up. Fifteen or 25 Megabits per second would bring rural folks pretty much up to date. My wife has cousins in rural Iowa about three miles outside a small town with those kinds of speeds from the local cable company but can only get 750 kilobits per second and 1.5 Megabits per second via DSL. Their parents live about half a mile down the same road and can only get dial up. Of course web pages now are filled with large images and it must be more than painful to load a single such page. My point is even if Gbps is made available in some areas a much more pressing need is to get reasonable responsive Internet speed to rural areas. Might be a good idea to go ahead and do it with fiber and skip coax.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
It is DOCSIS. And there are providers offering Gbit speeds on cable using DOCSIS 3.0 with version 3.1 offering speeds of 10 Gbit. Even lowly DSL has new technologies that can support up to 1Gbit for short distances. Fiber is nice and all (I have it) but it isn't outpacing the encumbent technologies any time soon, at least while the ISP's are holding the reins. I have 50 Mbit service and it is expensive. Max offering is 300 Mbit (same as cable) and is crazy expensive.
The average person makes $115 per month. You ARE the 1%. Realizing that, you can quit complaining, asshole.
Have you ever actually travelled in the developing world? A lot more than 1% of the world has a computer now, and for those who don't cyber cafes are there to serve them nearly anywhere you go. Furthermore, even in the Third World young people with rudimentary smartphones are not an uncommon sight, and as these are often brought on credit, they are increasingly available to people you wouldn't think could own one. The world is changing fast.
This is another symptom that the US is sliding out of the first world and into the third world. It goes along with our creaky unmaintained road, water and sewage infrastructure, along with our badly out of date airports and crappy passenger rail system.
You have OBVIOUSLY never been to a real third world country, or anywhere even close. What you call an unmaintained road is like a forty lane superhighway in some places.
And then there's our overpriced and underperforming health delivery system. (Note: ACA/Obamacare is a part of the solution
HA HA HA HO HE HA HA HO HO HA HA HA!!!
Oh man, that was hysterical! The very force that is dramatically raising healthcare costs, by pouring "free" government money into the system! God that was funny.
And our failing K-12 education, which is severely underfunded
OMG!!! Just as I thought you couldn't get any more hilarious, you claim the nation spending more than any other country in the world per student is "underfunded". And pretending the problem with U.S. schools has anything to do with money whatsoever! HA HA HO HOE HO HA HA HA HA HA HA HE HO HA HO HA HA HA HAH AH....
But it's all OK, because the upper 10%, and mostly the upper .01% and above are doing really good
I hope you smile when you stare at the mirror that hard.
You are just a walking platitude, aren't you. Thanks for the laugh!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There's a lot of cute Ukrainian women looking for US husbands I hear... ;)
Gigabit vs. 100 Mbps is mostly meaningless from an average end user point of view. Assume 5-10 Mbps for a high quality 720p stream, then a family of 4-5 can each watch their own movies/videos without affecting each other. They can probably do it on 50 or 25 Mbps.
The higher speed increases their overall capabilities (4k video, cloud backup, other services, and so on). But just like with cell phones, higher speed is pointless without unlimited data. You'll just use up the data faster. Heck, I was looking at Exede Satellite (12/3 up/down). It's unlimited data late at night/early in the morning. Schedule your OS updates, Steam downloads, and video download for that time period and it's not a bad deal if you have no other options (assuming you get 12 Mbps down).
Metering data isn't a bad idea, but I'm thinking more like $10 for a terabyte, not $10 for 50 GB (or $10 per gigabyte for cell phones). I'd always go for slower speed with unlimited data (or at least very cheap data) over high speed, limited data (and expensive). Cable companies don't want to do this. Data caps, like net neutrality, are actually meant to protect their video services. Netflix, Amazon Video, YouTube, and legions of other services are their competitors. Internet video is the creative destruction of the traditional cable companies. And they're fighting it tooth and nail.
The easiest answer to this problem is to vertically separate the cable companies. They can own the cables, but can't provide services (such as cable TV or internet access) or sell directly to consumers. Other companies make agreements with them and sell services over those wires. See MVNOs as a real-world example of this. This could also apply to municipal fiber networks so you get the benefits of true private competition.
I hope you realize that that is more than enough money to have a computer and internet access, and most Ukrainian households have them. I lived in Ukraine around the turn of the millennium when incomes were lower still, and already virtually every young person I knew had a PC. Parents just took the hit and made an investment. (Of course the big expense for Ukrainians was be software, and as they could not afford legitimate software, you could buy pirated software CDs at any small market). Internet access has exploded in the years since not only do to rolling out of broadband all over the country, but also 3G. Many people like Facebook or vKontakte on their mobile phones.
Nowadays I live in Romania where the average monthly income is not much higher than what you cite for Ukraine, and yet people would laugh in your face if you suggested that computers were an unobtainable luxury. I myself only make around US$500/month and yet I enjoy fiber to my door.
Guys, do we really need 273 Gbit/s to the home that fiber provides. Isn't this just a bandwidth pissing match. My neighborhood has more bandwidth than yours.
I, for one, would be happy with 1GigE connection. Extra bandwidth would just bring diminishing returns. What education, what healthcare and social good needs that kind of bandwidth? So now you get your Youtube videos a millisecond faster.
Think of all the children that grew up using 28.8k modems. Oh, the humanity.
I, for one, am certain that the only thing standing between Africa and prosperity is 4k cat videos. And/or pornography. Support the diaspora of your neocolonialist hegemony today!
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
...until connectivity is designated infrastructure citizens in that nation will be subjected to being nothing but profit creators for the powers that be. That is why I cheer for every business that requires internet connectivity to survive. One day access to the internet will be considered as necessary as access to roads, and it is only then that US citizens will have free access to the web.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I get 40 Mbps down on my cable connection, and that's enough that each of my four family members can watch a different Netflix HD movie at the same time. I could pay more to get 100 Mbps. How is cable not fast enough?
If you think that fiber to the home is really important, move to an area where you can get it. Other people think that low housing costs, clean air, a nice job, wildlife, or other factors are more important.
Any nice thing happens and some asshat comes along to say "but we won't all have it at the same time instantly!"... Seriously?
Can you just be happy someone has something nice? And eventually it will get around to everyone. It is better that someone has something then that no one has it. This envy based value system is really getting old.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Here in Oz the prospect of fibre-to-the-home is fading fast as the current extreme right-wing government believes ordinary citizens don't need it. The service will be available to a few, in some areas, if they can afford to have it laid on. Meanwhile the "National Broadband Network" currently being rolled out is based on copper wire to the home and many regional and rural areas won't even get that. We'll be stuck with pathetically slow "broadband" for decades now.
If anything tech heavy schools hurt more because of a magic blend of
A. the tech funds rush to the worse schools where it is the last thing they need
B. It likely caused more ADD like behavior
C Computers don't actually help you learn how to write or math or think better
Going into a job not knowing how to use MSword was not the problem. "Poor" people were not being left behind any faster then before. The debacle in some schools (for example see https://www.google.com/search?...) over reaching for tech instead of more teachers is a direct result of newspapers writing about the "Digital Divide" for over 16 years till the point the copy came to be believed.
Interesting. The world population is about 7 billion now. 1% of that population is 70 mllion. So you think only 70 million people in the world have access to computers?
That's very easy to show you're way the hell off. The US population is 300 million, of which 75% have internet access at home. So that's 225 million people in the US ALONE that have access to a computer and internet access.
You also might want to update your view of the 3rd world from 50+ years ago. It's not simply a mass of people that are all farmers anymore. That exists in much of the world, but it's very quickly changing. Many people have computer access. I wouldn't venture a guess as to how many, but your view is clearly incredibly wrong just from a cursory examination.
AccountKiller
Great stories about "innovative use" and what not, but we all know 99,5% of people will use it exclusively to get/share HD video content of whatever is the latest HBO series or Hollywood blockbuster.
I always ask myself how I could possibly survive with only 1.2MB/s down (basic DSL). Then I turn my Internet TV on and notice that it works just fine.
Sure I can get fiber but why would I? I'd have to pay more for no benefit other then that I can download a 20-40GB game quicker.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
I live in a third-world country.
Talk of high speed internet for education, medical applications and small business empowerment is all very noble.
But all I read in the news about your first-world high speed 'ternet is how you complain about streaming TV restrictions.
The real world is not so pragmatic.
I am using Frontier 100 down 15 up now.
in Lynnwood WA its great 4-6 Millisecond pings to google.com , and other sites. speedtest.net shows 5 millisecond ping to netriver
Speed matters less with each step up. Going from a modem to broadband is amazing, going from something like 256k DSL to 20mb cable is pretty damn huge, however going from 20mbps cable to 200mbps cable is nice, but fairly minor and going from a few hundred mbps to gbps is hardly noticeable.
I have 150mbps cable at home, and get what I pay for. Games from GOG and Steam download at 18-19MB/sec. It is fun, I can download a new game in minutes... however outside that I notice little difference from the 30mbps connection I stepped up from. Streaming worked just as well before, web surfing was just as fast, etc. The extra speed matters little to none in day to day operations.
Same thing at work. I'm on a campus and we have some pretty hardcore bandwidth, as campuses often do, so much it is hard to test as the testing site usually is the limit. Downloading large stuff it is nice, though really not that much less time than at home. I don't really mind the difference between a 2-5 minute wait and a 15-20 minute wait for a program. Surfing, streaming, etc all are 100% the same, no difference at all, speed seems to be limited by waiting for all the DHTML crap on a site to render, not the data to download.
While geeks get all over excited about bigger better more when it comes to bandwidth, for normal use what matters is just to have "enough" and "enough" turns out to be not all that much. It'll grow with time, of course, higher rez streaming, larger programs, etc will demand more bandwidth but still this idea that there is the difference between uber fast Internet and just regular fast Internet is silly.
It will not create any meaningful divide.
People living in South Korea and Japan get to enjoy gigabit bandwidth - and they are relatively cheap too!
Why can't the USAians get the enjoy the same?
If there is a digital divide, it would put USA in the bottom pile
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
How dare they build a better lives for themselves, due to superior genes...
OMG! I feel so second class now that I'm stuck using 65M DOCSIS. Whatever will I do? Really?!?
I was part of a telecommuting pilot program for our company back in the late 90s using dial-up. Digital bandwidth isn't everything. The largest resistance to accomplishing tasking was the frequent interruptions in the cube-farm in the office. So, even with a slow connection, I got much more accomplished from home.
Now, I'm "stuck" with the local cable company's slowest DOCSIS 3.0 at 65M. Our family stopped caring years ago. I'd gladly give up some if they'd charge me less.
Just another day in Paradise
I don't know the answer, but could it be lower cost/customer in Korea? S.Korea is much smaller than the US so the cost to provide gigabit internet is lower as you need less manpower, fewer routers and shorter cables to connect.
Calculations:
Population of s.korea: 50 million
Area of s.korea: 100,210 sq km
Percentage of internet users: 84.8%
Population of us: 318 million
Area of us: 9.826 million sq km
Percentage of internet users: 84.2%
Based on these numbers, there are 424 s. korean internet users per sq.km and only 27 us internet users per sq km. Because of the high number of users in s. korea, the cost provide each with internet service is a lot lower.
Because US population density looks more like Africa than it does like Europe and East Asia. We spread ourselves out which drives the cost of providing telco services through the roof.
Really....does it matter how fast your connection is when most US-based ISPs are trying to change the market into a pay-per-download-amount system? It just means you'll hit your allotted 'cap' that much sooner.
I was just finally able to upgrade from 26.4 dialup (multiplexed phone line) to DSL 4.5 years ago. I'm thrilled with 1.0 Mib/s! I live in the 4th largest city in Ohio. We've got faster options available, but they're too expensive.
is far beyond what i need at home, it is more that i need to have a perfect remote terminal. If i need more, i rent a server with a good network connection.
I live in the sticks. I have a shitty ISP that shits on my interactive sessions in favor of long-running connections like Netflix, and then tells me they don't do any shaping. But obviously they do shaping, because we have bandwidth limits. And it looks like shit. The traffic chart looks like a row of fenceposts because they flood me with packets, then send none, then flood me with more of them in order to limit my rate. This of course means that I can't do any meaningful queueing on my end, because the rate is totally inconstant.
But atop that, they offer me only an "up to 6Mbps" connection. That's not even enough to watch HD video reliably. A page full of images takes ages to load, especially since most people are still just spewing the images onto the page and they all load at once. And if that weren't enough, the connection goes down regularly, I often have to power cycle the CPE...
FTTH is not going to create a new digital divide. We already have one, and the only content lurking in the wings waiting to eat up all the bandwidth is 4k video. Most of us don't have a 4k set, so it's irrelevant.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At least in large parts of the USA, it's that "broadband" isn't affordable. "Basic" DSL or cable, with download rates of less than 5 Mbps, cost upwards of $50/month. Higher speeds are proportionally faster -- and very, very few people even in the USA are willing to pay hundreds of dollars a month for download speeds far less than those taken for granted in other developed countries.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Europe (France) here. I'm fine with my DSL for 16€/month (incl. phone). I don't want your 100+$ cable. My connection is reliable, cheap and responsive enough.
For how can we tax the middle class to give something they don't actually have, to poor black people. Sorry but that's it.
I don't live on top of a mountain 200 miles from civilisation, i live in a city in england... at home the fastest option for internet is a 3Mbit ADSL line. At work i have fibre, the difference is ridiculous, browsing at home is painful because many web developers seem to assume that everyone on earth has access to a 100Mbit connection... on top of that ISPs here seem to like throttling ssh traffic which makes it even more painful to do work at home, also occasionally the exchange fucks up and has given me ping times of well over 2000ms consistently for days which some protocols just can't deal with...
my ISP is talk talk they are the only LLC everything else here sucks also, the infrastructure and the capacity. I can easily see it making a divide if an assumption like "10Mbit" is made by content creators. It's easy to assume some minimum if you've never experienced less.
USA does.
I do in Chattanooga TN. And my cousins in Kansas City do as well.
What dump place in the USA do you live in?
It will. It already has. I'm stuck on rural DSL. 3.0 mb/s. I am already unable to participate in many of the activities my friends constantly do. Livestreaming isn't possible, especially if I'd like to also have skype up for bidirectional voice chat instead of one way. I don't have the bandwidth to do Opencanvas without lagging like crazy. Video chat of any kind is pretty much right out. When you're the guy with 384 kbps up and everyone else is rocking 70/20, you really do realize how much it sucks to have shitty internet.
S.Korea is much smaller than the US so the cost to provide gigabit internet is lower as you need less manpower, fewer routers and shorter cables to connect.
This argument comes up every time people discuss American internet rates. It is nonsense. The overall population density makes NO difference. Only the local density matters. There is no reason that someone living in New York City should pay more for internet because there is a lot of empty space in Arizona. Furthermore, there is little correlation between density and cost. Small towns generally do not have more expensive internet than large cities. And there are plenty of countries with population densities lower than America, that nonetheless have cheaper and faster internet.
I have fiber to the house. I cancelled the service (AT&T U-Verse) because Comcast offers significantly higher bandwidth tiers.
I'm in the same boat - AT&T fiber to the side of the house, so I sign up. I get the best (18/1.5) tier with the promise 'we will be increasing speeds significantly in a year'. Three and a half years later, I cancel, and sign up with Comcast for their 50/10 tier at half the price (after the promo expires, right now it's roughly a third of the price).
AT&T U-verse fiber to the premises can suck it.
Well, further clarification is necessary. AT&T can suck it. Comcast can too, but at least they can provide the bandwidth.
> Your attitude is the root cause of the ever increasing divide between the rich and the rest in the US.
The rich in the rest _IN_THE_US_. That's a hoot. 75% of Americans make over $2,000 / month. That's seventeen times as much as the average person makes. You're fabulously wealthy, yet whining because your two cars are Toyotas and not Ferraris. What a spoiled brat.
> Do you want to be a member of the lower strata of society with no upward mobility and no ability to change your status?
Let's have a look at upward mobility. My dad grew up in a shack with a dirt floor. Five people in one room. Sunday was meat day; they always tried to get a rabbit or something to have be able to have meat once a week. There's no way they could afford meat most days, but they managed to be able to have it once a week. Forty years later, my dad took his kids on the corporate jet. He was a vice president of an oil company, whose job involved working with crown Prince (now king) Abdullah. That's upward mobility. He didn't go from dirt poor to corporate jets by whining about "rich people". He got rich by working his ass off doing what rich people do.
The population density of the USA is low in large part because huge portions have no people at all. Yes, the internet access there sucks, but the bears and elk don't really seem to care. On the other hand, some parts of the USA do have very low population density but still have fat pipes.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The fastest wireline Internet I can get here in South Carolina is 768k.
Hut villages in sub-saharan Africa have access to LTE infrastructure for free, courtesy of the Chinese government trading LTE networks for mineral rights.
Having not had enough money to get a new car or repair my old one, I can tell you the "kinetic divide" actually involves sitting by the side of the road waiting for a tow.
But the point is made... people without enough money need more money not just more bandwidth.
I don't buy it. Fiber's cheap, and our cities are plenty dense enough to support fiber to the home. Indeed, we already have fiber to the home in many cities.
We could probably connect 90% of the country's population with fiber just as easily as South Korea did. But we don't, because lobbyists.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
I'd like to hear from a cable expert about the cost of these cables. With all the talk of copper shortage, I am wondering if the economics are there to drive fiber over copper.
Check the speed test of a superfast residential connection on the link below.
From the first city in the USA with the fastest residential connection.
I had multiple windows playing Ultra HD videos from you tube.
Its just AMAZING.
https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=TLIvcfivVmE
What the other replies said to this guy about average vs local density is perfectly correct. But even in low density areas, this is STRICTLY an upfront capital issue. Only the original install costs much more. The increased service delivery cost once you have the larger amount of fiber per customer installed is barely worth discussing except for the accountants who finally figure out that the US suburbs should be paying 1.87 cents per GB rather than 1.74...it would be those kinds of numbers.
The article says it plainly: in dense apartment areas, $280 per install; US housing, $2200. But really, what's $2200? A one-time investment that pays off over what, 40 years? The copper lines to my house date to 1954, the TV cable to 1973. The asset lifespan exceeds the 40 year max that even a large utility can get to pay down an investment. So even with interest (which these days is tiny, by the way, but lets use 4%), it's about $100/year added to your bill to pay off your install, unless you want to pay up front.
God, it's such a crap argument in so many ways - so unworthy of a nation that was among the first to bring in electricity and then phone and then cable, the last especially to provide so much less utility (57 channels and nuthin' on...) than Internet...but it comes up every time. That 57 channel TV cable was DONE, jack, between about 1970 when I first heard talk of it, and 1980 when everybody had switched to it. Here we are 20 years after everybody started wanting on the Internet, and virtually no new lines strung, they're still using the 1930s phone wires and the 1970s TV cables that were already paid for...but charging you like they had.
The people making these excuses for them are among the robbed, and they should just stop.
People living in South Korea and Japan get to enjoy gigabit bandwidth - and they are relatively cheap too!
I thought the Scots were supposed to be cheap, not Koreans and the Japanese?
Ezekiel 23:20
What good is 1G internet speeds if there is a data cap of 300G?
Fiber is great but if its controlled by the same ISPs that happen to also be media companies then its something I don't want any part of. .ISO download will cost me $10.
I have the option of super fast but capped DOCSIS3 here but I will stick with my cheap uncapped DSL. I don't want to have to think about how much a stream will cost or if this next
I have to return some videotapes...
its called DOCSIS, its a protocol/series of specs driven by CABLELABS.
Get some fucking landline broadband out to all of us stuck with satcoms or GFY sometime this decade and I'll be more than happy to weigh in on all this.
Overall health insurance rates and premiums have gone up every year since forever. Obamacare didn't change that at all. Rates are still going up and will continue to do so even more, going forward, because of the reason the OP outlined.
What you are speaking to is the subsidy that I and other slashdotters pay so that this group or that group can pay less than market rates for healthcare when they go to buy it on the individual market. Apparently you and your buddy are in one of those groups so what you are seeing is an illusion. The costs you used to bear are simply being transferred to other people so it is "more affordable" to you.
We can argue on another day about how much redistribution should be going on but make no mistake, the "affordability" you speak of is nothing more than a redistribution of the costs.
Witness the increase of standard memory configurations in PCs from 512-1GB to 8-16GB and the same with 5400RPM ATA HDDs versus SATA 6GB/s SSDs. The former is 16-32x more memory and the latter is in some cases two orders of magnitude faster, yet people in the millions still use these older PCs to use the internet. They won't be able to watch 4k HD video, possibly, but it's not going to be an exclusionary evolution.
Man, some of you people are just hell bent on dividing everyone up into classes. One wonders if the very existence of such arbitrary divides (and, concomitantly, the bigotry of anti-individualism that necessarily underlies it) and the loud excoriations of such are indicators that we have nothing better to complain about and should appreciate that we have the luxury to sink to such busy-body mundanity.
What makes you think fiber is cheap?
That's fine. And if you wanted internet within cities then that wouldn't be a problem. But most people want to get to websites and internet services outside their cities. Which means they need to be using national bandwidth. If 100k people are consuming 1gbs of bandwith that's 100tbs going into the city often over hundreds of miles. So say 5 fiber links out 20-40tbs of capacity for often hundreds of miles. Then that gets intermixed with what the city itself is consuming.
We don't remotely have the technology to support that much bandwidth. So sure. You want to file share with the guy down the block the local cable company could put in fiber. But you want to gigabit+ bandwidth to everyhome that's unthinkably expensive.
Yeah that must be it. The evil telcos don't want you to buy more of their product. The same banana importers are lobbying to block grocery stores from selling bananas by the bunch.
When it comes to telco it isn't nearly twice as expensive to hit every house as it is to hit every other house. It is much cheaper to have government organizing the digging up of streets and private property than to negotiate with the private and public landholders. Government can cut the cost per user enormously if they engage. I think the article is BS but your refutation is as well.
Smaller towns may not have more expensive internet, but they have less of it. More small town residents still use dialup, or have no choice other than poor quality cable. If you want good internet in the US you will find it very often in the largest cities but not in the small towns or rural areas.
30 minutes outside Denver, between two fiber trunks. Still no high speed internet. Should I feal robbed?
Cable and DSL/whatever is about 3 miles or less from here, and has been for over 10 years. Neither the phone company or either cable provider wants to service us. Even dialup over hardwire lines is limited to 22Kbps (with good working, high quality 56K modems) due to bad copper in the ground. So our main internet is satellite that costs a huge amount (10G / mo for $50 US, and $10/G additional). -- Your taxes to 'bring broadband internet to the rural community' aren't working here. -- We have mainly 2G cell service, AT&T or Sprint mostly, Verison if you go to the top of the hill and stand on a picnic table. All this within 25 miles of a 'major US city' (Nashville, not to major but still not to small).
... "When you pry the source from my cold dead hands."