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Comment by codecamper | Hacker News Reader

10 terabits per second on a single strand.

Amazing. I think if people back in 2000 would have realized the capacity coming along in fiber, then a site like youtube would have been obvious to many more people. Back then, I think a lot of people thought it would be cool to have a video distribution site... but how the heck would you pay for it. I remained amazed and confused by how Google could somehow afford to embed video on every random website -- becoming the video provider of the entire Internet. But I guess for them it was a simple formula of using their excess capacity for something.

Amazing.

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About video streaming (Youtube, Netflix) - aren't they based more around keeping caches "local" to the user rather than relying on inter continental communications to stream? (honest question, as I can't understand if those 10 terabits would scale enough to be the decisive factor on the feasibility of Youtube)

What you are describing are so called "edge" servers, and this is indeed a technique for content distribution, but it relies on partnerships with willing ISP. You essentially set up connection "peering" with the ISP, in which you bypass expensive internet uplinks.

However, I can also imagine that quite a non-neglectible proportion of Youtube/Netflix traffic cannot be retrieved from such a cache.

That's correct, this is why CDNs exist, you don't want to backhaul this volume of traffic.

In 2000, George Gilder wrote "Telecosm: How Infinite Bandwidth Will Revolutionize Our World"

http://www.amazon.com/TELECOSM-Infinite-Bandwidth-Revolution...

One blurb from the book that stuck with me was the notion that in theory, accessing an external hard drive half-way across the world via a pure fiber connection could be quicker than accessing an external hard drive on your desk via copper. True? I don't know, but he thought so at the time.

That's the current rate, theoretically the bandwidth of fiber is limitless. Each generation of transmission equipment generally increases the bandwidth fiber can carry.

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