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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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.