Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/17/just-another-con.html
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The problem with US internet is a problem of mindset. This mindset is brought about by constant advertisement and propagandizing by the ISP. They could easily spend their advertising budget on researching and implementing new technologies that are vastly superior to the current infrastructure. But they are not in the business of researching and implementing new technology. They are in the advertising business.
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Is it 10 Gb/s, as the text says, or 50 Gb/s, as shown in the image?
I get the sentiment that wireless is bullshit for the users that don’t have to move around, but I don’t get why fiber is necessary for the last mile for most users.
Except for having more speed for the sake of it, I don’t see why so much bandwidth is necessary.
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Google Fiber was a welcome and unexpected benefit to moving to Austin, and I very quickly realized how very, very right Cory is on all points in this article.
Because Canada isn’t much better on average. FTTP is the way forward.
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give me fiber or give me death!
Said everyone 60 and above.
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Probably not a popular opinion, but IMO for most people fiber to the door is complete overkill. People right now are paying for broadband speeds claiming to be 100mbps+ , but using no where near that (even if it were possible). Most people don’t need or care about 4k streaming or uploading terabytes to the cloud and are over-paying as it is. Sure, if we were talking fiber as a public utility, breaking monopolistic control over access… all for it. But I do agree, fuck 5g. What happened to municipal wifi?
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No ants in these pants over 5G. Can’t imagine why it’s such a big deal now. Because China’s got it? Because everyone is so accustomed to constant incremental upgrades and improvements?
4G is plenty fast for me. Heck, I was good with DSL, back when the Internet was actually fun in spite of its problems.
All I expect coming out of 5G are new, immersive, high-def adverts.
ETA: yeah, and what the fellow above me posted!
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I have fiber, but since I have Frontier, and Frontier sucks, it’s more expensive and slower than what Xfinity offers (I have 200/200 speeds right now). It does offer some advantages though, speeds are symmetrical which is nice, there’s no bandwidth caps, and I get exactly the speeds I’m paying for since I’m not sharing bandwidth with anybody else.
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Fiber to the block is sensible, since it’s possible to share the terabyte bandwidth with many of your neighbors. Cox in Tucson is doing this now. Cable within a block is quite decent.
We’re seeing some 5G cells appear on streetlights around the university. I may have to hang out with someone with a new phone to tell me if it’s any good.
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We have a fiber hub down at the end of our street. Haven’t looked into what it would cost to get hooked up. Happy at the moment with TekSavvy.
Why do I want FTTP?
Squirrels. We have squirrels. They have a bad tendency to chew through the lines near my house. Including my cable lines; which are hung basically in the trees on an elevated line through the ravine, next to the power lines. This means that every couple of years, the squirrels eat through our line and we get suck service until we call and they come out and, after roughly the 5th service call, actually look at the problem and go and replace the connector that the squirrels ate through.
Right now, I am dealing with our internet being out for about 2 hours a day and unstable the rest of the time. We’re watching TV via an over-the-top service (which the cable company LOVES) and we have constant problems with speed. We’re paying for our service’s uber-super speed; and getting perhaps 10-20 actual MBPS, that’s probably too high of an estimate.
I hope that FTTP will be run in conduit which is squirrel proof. I’m hoping that the network topography will be an unshared link back to the CO and a link to the net backbone, so that I don’t have to worry about my neighbors deciding that now would also be a great time to watch TV. I figure that even if, much like my cable service, I only get about 1/10th or 1/100th of what I’m paying for, that will be enough.
I’m in a suburb of one of the 20 largest cities in the United States; within the suburb’s city limits. I’m not that far out into the country. I live 1 mile off the interstate. And this is what I’m dealing with. Oh, and I have 1 bar of cell service in my house.
Our entire internet infrastructure completely and utterly sucks a donkey kong and I’m just hoping that FTTP is a do-over that will actually work and enable growth for the next 10 years, something that 5G will obviously not do.
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Yet.
There was a time when my 1200 baud modem was fine for what I needed. But then things improved out in the world, and I had to improve my equipment with them.
It’s a shame I’m not a telecom. I could just kick back and collect my sweet, sweet rent and not worry about improving a damned thing.
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It wasn’t so long ago that computers had less than 100Mhz processors, 50Mb hard drives, or 56k modems and people like you were touting about how most people dont use or need anything near that
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I’ve got servers barely limping along now because the previous sysadmin, in his great and unmatched wisdom, was so certain that the C: drive would never need more than 30gb.
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“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” - Bill Gates
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I wonder if he’s a colleague of the guy who left me with all the VMs where there’s a ‘dedicated’ drive for the page file; despite the fact that all the ‘drives’ are just abstractions carved out of the same SAN, good thing we’ve preserved the wisdom of the before times when you had to divide IOPs among the spindles to preserve the balance…(and also the VM hosts have RAM going idle so deliberately configuring database servers for a trip to swap hell makes no sense)?
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You are talking above my level of expertise (I installed VMWare once or twice), and a parsec or 2 above his.
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Signed up to the BBS just to post this:
I live in Brazil in a small (population ~60k) city some 320 miles from capital São Paulo. Here we have not one, but SIX fiber-to-the-home providers, each trying to outdo the others. I currently pay around $25 for 240 Mbps downstream but another ISP is already offering 350 Mbps for that price.
All of these ISPs laid their fiber cables all over the city, so even those living in the most remote neighborhoods can actually benefit from competition.
Also, installation is free, and they provide you with a 5 GHz wireless router free of charge. And all of that with only a 12 month contract.
So, I believe in you guys! If we did it, you can do it! 
(By the way this is not a fluke or something restricted to my region. There are lots of small and smaller Brazilian cities all over the country fully covered by FTTH provided by small - sometimes family-owned - ISPs)
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This is something I never understood. I don’t think there’s a single person in my state who has more than 2 or 3 choices for an ISP. Why do they spend so damn much on advertising?
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