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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.
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?
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.
Video calls suck, you have to shave. At least you don't need to put on pants.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
Remote support is fine on 6.5Mbits/s, I did that for years before I moved to a 50 Mbits/s connection. Same for Telecommuting depending on what you are working as. Hell corporate desktops where I work they still put through on a 10 Mbit port as the vast majority even within the office don't need more.
WAN backup and recovery is certainly valid, but hardly a necessity, same with family and friends VPN. The reality is you are reaching and didn't really come up with any must haves and yet you are saying others have no imagination.
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 too tempting to websurf during a teleconference.
I'm usually websurfing during video conferences too. You basically just need to point your camera from the monitor where you're surfing, and keep your browser near the camera to look like you're really into the topic at hand when you're really making picks for the weekend. (Also, be sure you're on mute most of the time and keep your desk - mouse and keyboard - off camera.)
Yeah, except "fiber to the house" in rural Ontario means eating a bowl of All Bran and going to the outhouse.
Mostly random stuff.
20 person meetings are generally a complete waste of time for the 19 who aren't monologuing.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
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.
"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.
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.
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!
Moving around multi gigabyte files over VPN at my work? Remote backups. Bandwidth isn't expensive. You can buy 1mb of transit for $0.45 in increments of 10gb. You can get a 100gb connection for $6k/month at an IX. Couple that with Netflix OpenConnect, and free YouTube peering, and you have some pretty cheap bandwidth.
Why artificially limit our speeds? What if someone came out with a 400mhz single core CPU and tried selling it for $3k. Would you not say that's crazy in this age of tech? Same thing. Fiber is cheaper and faster, magnitudes faster.
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.
I stream Netflix via Level 3. Pegs my 50mb connection when doing 720p for a good 15 seconds. When talking to a higher up in my ISP, he said bandwidth from Level 3 is too cheap to care about OpenConnect. Not worth the management.
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
That is not at all true. A single fiber cannot handle the world's internet bandwidth. And the PON systems used for homes don't even dedicate 1Gbit to each termination (house). You don't have a dedicated connection to a chassis with 2,000 other customers, you are PON split from a single fiber with a lot of other houses, then that goes to a chassis.
"It doesn't matter how it is shared as long as there is no congestion." is a useless truism. It's true for copper too.
I think it's hilarious that you think that your ISP is only oversubscribing their links 2x (2,000 1Gb connections to 1Tb backhaul). That's fantasyland at the prices that residential customers pay.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
if your personal website is sucking up 90Mbps for just 400 visits a day I have news for you, You have been hacked and are serving up games and video's for piracy sites. My enterprises datacenter pumps out approximately the same volume to the web, yet we handle approximately 30,000 users a day.
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 !
A single fiber cannot handle the world's internet bandwidth
Current state of the art is 1pb/s over a single fiber, about 10x the speed of the Internet. Obviously impractical for a single fiber to connect every house in the world. The Internet is about 100tb/s right now, you can get 30tb/s over a single fiber with commercially available technology.. So 3 fibers?
And the PON systems used for homes don't even dedicate 1Gbit to each termination
WDM-PON, which is what Google Fiber uses, is 40gb/40gb with 32 lambdas of 1.25gb/1.25gb each, given each end point it's own 1.25gb/s.
You don't have a dedicated connection to a chassis with 2,000 other customers, you are PON split from a single fiber with a lot of other houses
With GPON this is the most common setup, but WDM-PON is backwards compatible with regular GPON. The most common setup is dedicated fiber back to the CO, which means an upgrade to WDM-PON is as simple as switch out the line card, then placing lambda filters on each customer's fiber, which is done back at the CO. I've called up my ISP and had them change which GPON port I was plugged into, took them about 5 minutes from the time the tech said "give me a second".
I think it's hilarious that you think that your ISP is only oversubscribing their links 2x (2,000 1Gb connections to 1Tb backhaul). That's fantasyland at the prices that residential customers pay.
I wasn't talking about the backhaul, there is no backhaul. Fiber is best described as a "Non blocking consolidator that plugs directly into the trunk". My ISP has a 3x undersubscription, in that the trunk is 3x the peak monthly peak.
Fiber can't fix bad designs, but fiber lends itself naturally to cheap, easy, and scalable designs. A single consolidator/chassis can support 2,000+ customers with 3tb+ of bandwidth. If the ISP only uses 1gb uplinks, then they're screwed anyway. But for a one time cost of $6k, you can purchase a 100gb port. They're not expensive anymore. The point is fiber makes it retardedly simple to have the entire bottle-neck be the backbone, instead of some complicated mixture of middle-mile nodes and shuffling around customers.
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 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