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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.
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?
More on that:
Companies won't pay for infinite bandwidth, so they will throttle you eventually.
TCP_WINDOWS_SIZE will put a maximum on how much you can download based on how far away the server is. Anything more than 20 to 30ms and it won't be much faster than what we have today.
Anything that is encrypted is limited to the computational capacity of the CPU, unless you have an encryption acceleration chip. Around 25 to 35Mbps depending on the encryption method and how much load that crypt takes. More secure means more CPU, right now arc_four being the fastest, but least secure.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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.
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.
With current technology, a single strand of fiber can handle the entire world's Internet bandwidth. Statistical multiplexing works best with large amounts of traffic, something a fiber consolidator can easily do, but copper cannot. I would rather have a 1gb fiber connection to chassis with 2,000 other customer, a 3tb/s backplane, and 1tb/s of uplink, than a 1gb coax connection with 5gb shared among 100 people, to a node that has 800 people and 20gb of uplink.
Going fiber essentially removes all choke points from the last mile, completely gets rid of the middle mile, and lets customer plug directly into the trunk. Then it's just a matter of sizing the trunk. It doesn't matter how shared it is as long as there is no congestion.
Incorrect. Many older protocols don't support it. FTP, SSH based, etc. BOTH sides must agree to the larger window size. As little as .01% packet loss can reduce throughput by 50%.
I run into this all the time at work, where moving data over large pipes over long distances still limits transmission speeds. I move datacenters for IBM, so I see it a LOT.
If it were not such a problem, CISCO WAAS, Silverpeak, Riverbed and others would not make appliances to fix this exact problem. Riverbed even makes end user software that talks to concentrators at the corporate datacenter to eliminate TCP window size issues impacting application performance.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
Actually AC was very correct. TCP window scaling was a proposed standard back in 1992 (rfc1323) and the issue does not lie with FTP/SSH/etc but with the application implementing those protocols failing to set a larger receiving buffer. Yes, both sides need to send the window scaling SYN option, however, once sent protocols running on top of it should not be affected (unless the receiving buffer is smaller than the scaling)
It's funny because they even make reference to LFNs (long fat networks) and how the proposal fixes the problem.
When I was a student, sharing a house with three other people, we paid extra to get the 1Mb/s connection that was the fastest that the cable company offered. The top gradually grew to 3Mb/s, 5Mb/s and then 10Mb/s. When it hit 10Mb/s (I'd moved house and was living with a different group of people, but) we still paid for it. But then I stopped caring. The 10Mb/s went from being the fastest that they offered to the slowest. Then 20Mb/s and 30Mb/s became the slowest. I'm now still on their slowest connection (although living in a different city). At work, I have a GigE connection that means that most of the time the bottleneck isn't my local connection, and I can usually get 10-20MB/s to any moderately large Internet site. I very occasionally notice the difference between the speed at home and at work, but most of the time there's no user-perceptible difference. Oh, and my ISP sent me a letter a few weeks ago saying that they don't offer 30Mb/s anymore and they'll be moving me to 50Mb/s soon. I think somewhere around 10-20Mb/s was when I stopped noticing Internet speed as a bottleneck.
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