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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.
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
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.
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.
TCP_WINDOWS_SIZE can grow up to 2GB which is enough for a 10GB link with 1600ms latency. I'm not going to say that your OS will be happy about it, but that's the logical limit. As for AES 256 encryption, a modern desktop CPU can handle 100mb-300mb per core, unless you have AES-NI, then it's more like 1gb per core. OR if you're like me, you NIC supports line rate IPSEC offloading, so 4gb/s with 0% cpu overhead, assuming IPSEC and not VPN.
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.
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.
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.
When you kid is downloading some patches from Steam, Blizzard, and who knows what, all at the same time, while running BitTorrent to get the newest Linux ISOs, and remote backing up your computer.
You should not notice any issues. If you do, you don't have enough bandwidth.
Let me repeat... You should not EVER have thing think about your bandwidth or how you are using your internet connection. If you ever have to stop and think, "why is this slow", you don't have enough. You should have to micromanage what is ran and when, or who can do what at what times, etc.
We have the technology to provide every user so much bandwidth, that it's nearly impossible for them to ever run into an issue of using it all.
1) TCP alternatives are already being developed
2) TCP_WINDOW_SIZE problem was solved long long ago with TCP_WINDOW_SCALING. The limit is roughly 100 Gbit/s at 80ms
3) Not sure where you're getting your data from but reality is a very different place from where you live. 25 MBps would be an Intel Atom 230 decrypting AES-128-CBC. 5 year old mobile/low power processors were never meant to stand the test of time. Take something from around the same period, like say an Intel T5550 and all the sudden you're up to 80MBps for AES-256-CBC (or 109MBps AES-128-CBC). Even dropping down to a P4 you can get 75MBps for AES-256-CBC.
Also, arc_four (aka RC4) is not even worth discussing as it's completely useless as encryption. RC6 is (comparatively) fast at low byte counts on specific platforms but quickly plateau with little performance increase after 128 bytes and slows by a factor of 3 if the hardware is not optimal. Rijndael, which was chosen for AES, had consistently fast speeds no matter the bytes or platform. The reality is that any chip with the AES-NI instruction set makes it a moot point, by example the i7-3960X is churning out 5.7GBps. Without it, performance does suffer, but you're still talking 250-400Mbps on a 4 core chip.
The real question is how the heck this got posted to Slashdot. DOCSIS 3.1 bumps the limits to 10 Gbit/s down, 1 Gbit/s up and even on DOCSIS 3.0 - who says you've got to be stuck at 4 channels? 24 Channel is already actively deployed in Canada at 200-250Mbps down/15-30Mbps up, 1.5Gbps/150Mbps in the UK.
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.
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.