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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.
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
> Name ONE use case other than streaming multiple 4K video channels which REQUIRES anything more than the 6.5Mbit/s connection
Remote support of friends and families running GUI enabled operating systems.
Telecommuting (basically the same thing as above but for money)
Usable WAN backup and recovery.
Family and friends VPN.
Imagine anything you do at your job and imagine doing that between your friends and family or with some commercial cloud provider. The same goes for stuff you do at home and just want to extend over a larger network.
If you can't figure out what to do with a better-than-a-cablemodem networking then you really don't have any imagination at all.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Just to elaborate...the author is extremely vague here. Let's just pick an arbitrary number, say 10mbit, which is actually quite slow (in my opinion, but the local cable co provides 150mbit connections, and just started rolling out gigabit, so maybe I'm biased.)
Anyways what services CAN'T you obtain at 10mbit? Nothing health related comes to mind, nothing education related comes to mind, and social goods..what the FUCK does that even mean? Anyways, a 10mbit link is fully capable of streaming 1080p video, which is about the most demanding consumer grade application I can think of.
Therefore, I have no idea what possible "divide" the author could be referring to. Furthermore, the author strikes me as being grossly uneducated about the topic because of the blatant misspelling of the acronym DOCSIS.
If he wants to make a better case (which it sounds like he's pushing for some kind of socialist and/or social justice agenda) then he should at the very least give examples of WHAT, EXACTLY these people wouldn't have access to.
He would have a case for a slow upstream (it's common for DSL providers to only provide less than megabit data rates) in health care if, say for example, a medical practitioner needed an HD video feed to evaluate their patient (which doesn't seem to be a likely scenario) but he didn't state that. But, that still doesn't apply to anything else he mentioned.