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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.