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Gilder's Law

netlingo.com

17 pointsdedalus9 comments

With Google Fiber having mostly failed to induce typical broadband in the US above 200 Mbps, what is the conventional wisdom on when the next significant shift in speeds will come, and what the enabling tech will be?

Is it just going to be a glacial rollout of fiber along the last mile to homes? If so, what are the estimates for, say, the date when the median US home has a gigabit connection?

I live out in the middle of nowhere. 10 miles away from a post office, 15 miles from the nearest town with a high school, and 20 miles in a different direction from a city with any major retail outlets. And right now they're laying fiber in our area and should be available sometime next year. This really surprised me and I wasn't expecting it for another decade at least.

I'm actually not too hopeful about Starlink and LEO satellite internet for rural areas without some kind of government subsidies(which already exist for rural areas... at least phone ones IIRC). I'm a little more hopeful that that it may spook rural DSL monopolies into building out fiber.

Satellite internet is more interesting for truly remote locations, like ships, islands, and, at least for the time being, rural Africa. Fiber + cell solves a staggering number of problems. My daughter was streaming movies an hour into the mountains outside Chang Mai. Source: the uncomfortably warm phone in my pocket serving as the family hotspot.

I think satellite price/availability in rural areas is expected to advance much faster than cell service in the coming decade or two, so you shouldn't expect your current intuitions about which is appropriate where to hold. My impression is that almost all of the upcoming cell tech comes from packing tighter cells to enable higher bandwidth in crowded urban environments without much changing the cost of providing service over wide rural areas. Have you heard different?

Coverage will increase, but bits/human, particularly uplink, is going to be harder. I can see streaming 500 channels of video, but 10-20 async sessions per household over the entirety of North America sounds like a lot of bits. Even with, say 100 satellites overhead, that's still 5-6 million people per satellite. let's call it a million households. Particularly during peak use hours in the evening, that's a lot a lotta bits.

How did you find out they're laying down fiber? I'm wondering if there's a resource to check, and if there is any way to indicate interest other than the "give us your email and we'll notify you" form most providers have. I live less than a mile from a large apartment building that has fiber, yet my single family home development doesn't have it.

They sent us a letter in the mail and we see huge spindles of fiber laying along side the road with flags of where they're going to dig with the name of the ISP.

> I'm actually not too hopeful about Starlink and LEO satellite internet for rural areas without some kind of government subsidies

Why? SpaceX and competitors think they can compete on price with traditional providers in rural areas. You think they're overly optimistic?

My guess is that it will either come from wireless or satellites. I can't imagine the US building out fiber on a larger scale.

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