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You're supposed to want "fiber" because it's intrinsically better and shiny and faster. People who write these pieces always assume that we should want "fiber" regardless of what it costs to build, or whether there is demand for it, or how it will improve our lives. The private sector has not found "fiber" to be profitable, so for some reason government should do it because it's inherently good. It never occurs to these "fiber" proponents that maybe "fiber" is not profitable because it's not necessary.

America's wireless operators plow billions into capital investment, because there's market demand for it. That's the future. "Fiber" inspires geek fetishes because it's fast. Non-geeks on the other hand are using their phones to watch video and don't care about the alleged goodness of "fiber". After all, if they did care, FiOS would be expanding and Google would add more Fiber cities.

Government investment in FTTH is a twenty-first century boondoggle waiting to happen. It's nowhere near my list of beneficial things government could do if it wants to start plowing billions of dollars into capital investment.

There have been numerous studies done on the economic benefits to having broadly deployed, super fast wired Internet. The results are always the same: the economic benefits are dramatically underwhelming. It's true in Romania, Netherlands, Latvia and it's just as true in Kansas City [1]. Finland has had among the fastest Internet speeds for years - they've been stuck in a decade long near-depression economically and could hardly be further away from being in a tech boom from their high average access speeds. So where is the evidence to support the societal benefit of going from good speeds, to extremely high speeds? I've seen no evidence for it over the last decade anywhere on the planet.

For now, it turns out anything beyond ~50 to ~100mbps, is practically useless for consumers in delivering a big leap in productivity or quality of life. That has been the case for a decade (despite the propaganda in favor of spending a trillion dollars so everyone can have 1gbps tomorrow). South Korea for example has had among the fastest wired Internet speeds on the planet for a long time, it hasn't turned them into the next economic juggernaut in any regard (GDP per capita lower than Puerto Rico).

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-28/why-it-s-...

Romania switched to fiber for economic reasons. People were stealing and selling copper wires.

Optic cables don't have equivalent black market.

Source: Romanian I worked with.

People didn't know they wanted smartphones until we had them. Or more relevantly, people didn't know how slow their computers were until they got an SSD, and then suddenly mechanical storage was outrageously bad.

Fiber works the same way. There is wild potential for all kinds of new uses for computers if anyone anywhere could transmit at such tremendous data rates, in the same way solid state storage has enabled all matter of technologies through just raw throughput that couldn't be accomplished without it (mainly in the form of the highest definitions of video, or the recording thereof, which are the most common huge-bandwidth consuming tasks for consumers.

Private industry brought us smartphones. Private industry brought us SSDs. Those things are useful. I saw a smartphone and I said "oh, I can get my Gmail on it, cool." I saw SSDs and I said "I won't have to wait while my hard drive spins, cool."

No one has ever told me how my life would be better if I had massive Internet speed. I'm happy with the Internet speed I have now. That's why private investors have not been willing to roll it out, unlike with smartphones or SSDs. Government shouldn't go put up the money either.

In how many places was building copper profitable? If it wasn't for government intervention most of the world would still be waiting for copper connections.

I'm still waiting on ISPs to make good with the promised infrastructure rollouts when they received all that sweet government subsidies rather than hoarding it.

Hell there's been many times where I thought 'this is good enough' only to have my mind changed when something else improved upon it.

FiOS would be expanding if they charged a reasonable price for bottom tier service. I have a FiOS modem in my apartment and get tons of flashy junk mail urging me to sign up. No way will I ever pay for that when cable is good enough.

What is a "reasonable price?" It doesn't cost appreciably less for Verizon to wire up a 50/50 customer versus a 500/500 customer. The average FiOS customer spends about $110 per month, and even with that Verizon's wireline division only makes 2-5% operating profit each quarter.

Yes, exactly. In NYC, RCN is charging around $70/mo for 330 mbs down and something like 20 or 30 mbs/sec up. IIRC cable latency is very slightly worse than fiber. Still, Verizon charges well over $100 for more than 100 or 150 mbs down, and they are very keen on two-year contracts. No thanks.

Do you also believe that investment into physical transportation infrastructure is "unnecessary"? If not, why do you believe digital transportation infrastructure is less "necessary"?

I believe such investment with taxpayer dollars could be good, but someone needs to make the case first for why this is an effective use of taxpayer dollars. The only case I ever see is "fiber good, fiber fast," and no one makes the case for how it would make our lives better. Roads, bridges, and railroads have tangible positive impacts. What's the impact of rolling fiber to everybody's door, when many people are already served by hybrid fiber-coax and wireless networks that they find good enough?

Even a case for targeted rural broadband investment would be good, if rural areas lack broadband. Even then, the discussion should be about bringing those areas broadband, not bringing them FTTH. Fiber assumes a single solution to any possible problem...I guess because fiber, oh, that sounds cool.

I think it's an issue of being good enough for the types of things we do now. If it got astronomically better, it would enable things that we flat out can't even consider doing nowadays.

Plenty of people have it now and there isn't really a killer app for it. Even 4k streaming is only like 20mbit at reasonable quality.

"If you build it, they will come" isn't a good reason for such a large investment.

I think it makes more sense to focus on universal access to 50mbit for every household. Someone going from 600kb/sec DSL or Satellite to 50Mbit is a huge benefit. Going from 50Mbit to 1000mbit have very marginal benefits for a single family home.

Some sources: (video encoding guidelines)

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en

For pre-encoded HDR 1080p Google (youtube) recommends 15Mbps target rate for the video and 0.5Mbps for the audio (5.1). For 4K the numbers go up to as high as 85 and 0.5.

I use a rough rule of thumb that 'livestramed' things at the same quality should be double those bit-rates as a maximum.

This gives:

  FHD 16Mb/s
  4K  86Mb/s

I'd say it's reasonable for a 'single household' to have a number of guests over, say if they're having a party or if relatives are visiting for the holidays. Lets call the peak use 12 guests.

86 * 12 ~= 1032 Mb/s ; Thus Gigabit is NOT overkill. It is capacity and freedom for a small family and some guests to enjoy content and/or collaboration without anyone 'hogging' the connection.

12 guests streaming different HDR 4k is a ridiculous edge case.

Nobody is going extra for gigabit just to throw crazy 4k LAN parties.

It's not uncommon to have 4-6 simultaneous streams in a household. Two children with a TV and a tablet each, and the parents watching a movie. And they need to be able to game/browse at the same time.

It may not be what the majority to, but it's a non trivial part of the population.

4-6 simultaneous streams of what? Browsing and gaming require little bandwidth on a sustained basis. 4K is the only thing that makes a dent in modern broadband connections, and it's not like people can watch more than one of those at a time even if they have multiple devices capable of doing so.

We're a "cord cutter" household with three adults and a four year-old who has her own iPad. I wouldn't be surprised if we were top 1% for bandwidth users. Tops for us is probably one 4K stream (25 mbps), 2 HD stream (5 mbps), and then trivial amounts on top of that from the three adults intermittently playing on their phones. I've got 150/150 now, and will be upgrading to 750/750 when Verizon rolls it out in Annapolis. But really only because I can, not because I can use it.

Teenagers stream some series to the TV, watch a twitch on the tablet and game. I kid you not, this seems to be a normal usecase for some teenagers. Thats potentially a 4k and 1080p stream. Have two of those in the house and parents that want to watch a movie. That is, with your numbers of todays streaming, 85mbit, so a 100mbit connection will have very little room for improvement.

And improvements are coming, 4k 60fps HDR streams will come sooner rather than later, and they consume upwards of 100mbit pr stream.

What about two kids, each of which has two streams up because they're watching different 'sports' (or e-sports) events?

How about someone else installing a game they just got or want to re-install to play with friends?

Like I said, it's about having the capacity to handle the WORST case that could get thrown at it without impacting other users in the house.

The fact that you had to concoct such an absurd scenario to get 1Gbps of throughput kind of hammers home just how far we are from having a real use for such speed.

If it got astronomically better, we could download have even bigger JavaScript frameworks to render magazine articles even slower than is done now.

Infrastructure enabling new uses and more waste seem to be intrinsically connected. The same bandwidth increase that enabled video streaming also enabled clueless people to put multi-megabyte hero images (or even worse, videos!) in their articles.

This is the campaign Google sent out when rolling out Google Fiber, imagine the possibilities.

Okay, get me started, what is something? If they possibilities are endless, there must be a concrete example, right?

When I had a 56.6k modem, I was trying things way beyond it's capabilities as far as sending and receiving large files, playing games online, it was a disaster and there was very obvious and very real problems to be solved. And much more came after that, streaming movies!? Who knew.

With fiber, nothing seems to be coming close to pushing that limit from a consumer perspective. If there was something that was kinda shitty but still works okay on cable, what is it? Or what thing just isn't possible that is waiting for a faster connection?

I have a 25mbps connection, slow cable, and it does everything I need pretty flawlessly. Does it have to buffer sometimes for HD movies? Sure, not worth $50 more a month for that. I don't know what I'm missing out on with my slower connection, and if I am, people are doing a horrible job marketing what that is.

(I help people get faster internet connections): One common example I run into is people trying to stream IP security cameras to off-site. Once you have more than a couple of cameras then the upload on cable and DSL isn't enough.

Once they get things set up for their cameras, they realise that they can suddenly reliably watch 4K netflix; some have started streaming to twitch/youtube because it costs them nothing, and heaps more.

On the other side of the argument, there is the 'privacy' aspect of things: most people would never run a home server that runs email/social/backup for you (and connect to it from your phone while out and about). However once fast home internet connections are ubiquitous, I fully expect people to start taking back their data from google/facebook/etc of the world

Faster internet is like wider roads: the mere presence of it increases demand.

Well, with fibre every light bulb, ever thermostat, every smoke detector in your home could be sending all the details of your personal life to the Cloud! think of the possibilities: unaccountable corporations could analyse and parse your daily habits: your health insurance company could charge you more because you don't leave every morning to go for a run, the local Committee for the Promotion of Virtue & the Prevention of Vice could see when you're watching porn, the local fire department could see when you're using your charcoal grill, the local mafia could break in (because of course those unaccountable corporations are running unpatched and poorly-designed served) and see when you're not at home, and only break in when you're away! The future is now!

Lots more devices in your home. Think about how many Tvs some people have. Now consider that many 4K TVs each playing a couple streams.

Fair enough.

> then exactly what problem are we trying to solve?

speed is fine with big city cable internet, usually customer service, price, etc often is not, and those companies have successfully lobbied to do away with net neutrality so it is going to get worse, and cities where google fiber didn't make it, you have no competitor to turn to, who might offer net-neutral service.

> Would I take 1Gbps (or higher) home service? Sure, I guess. Do I need it? I don't see any reason to say that I do.

I agree. I have a 125/25 cable connection and am never yearning for more speed. I would take fiber if I could get it for the same price or less, but I'm certainly not going to pay more today. Of course a killer application could be just around the corner that requires 1gb/1gb.

I would love to be able to backup my data (usual collection of photo images and family videos ~4TB) over the public network but the fastest retail connection available here is 100/7 so it would take a very long time.
I agree that download capacity of ~100Mbit is plenty for today's applications.

Yes I can write my data to a hard drive and mail it somewhere, and I do that, but that's not network backup.

I don't live in a rural area, I'd call it "remote". There are about 20,000 people in the county and I don't live in a town - but I have fiber to my house. I started out with the slowest plan of 20 up and down and haven't seen why I should pay more. Sure a 100 or more would be nice once in a while, but I always get what I pay for and it is "fast enough". I work from home, stream everything I watch and it does the job.

I used to live in a city that didn't have a major telco most people were on one of a handful of small WISPs. Wireless worked OK, a tower could cover entire neighborhoods. I had a 20 up and down plan there, but given the shared nature of wireless I rarely saw it.

Where I'm at now, wireless would never work, too many trees, hills and not enough people. At these distances, copper stinks - so fiber it is. It isn't a company, but a co-op, so prices are reasonable. I'm sure there had to be some grants to get fiber all over the place because I'm not sure it could ever exist without them.

The last three places I've lived, I've had the option of either Comcast cable or Verizon FiOS (two apartments, and a house). FiOS is way better (much faster upload, much lower ping times). But Comcast has better television packages so all my neighbors have always stuck with cable.

"So wait.. if the customer is satisfied with the service they're receiving (eg, it's "fast enough") then exactly what problem are we trying to solve?"

Too expensive.