Why Fiber Is Vastly Superior to Cable and 5G
eff.org
eff.org
My 200Mb/s DOCSIS cable connection is well below the theoretical maximum, and is good enough for streaming 8K video, downloading a Linux distro in seconds, downloading a game in a few minutes, etc. The social effect of having this, versus 0.1Mb/s connectivity I had before is huge, but greater bandwidth would not greatly change my experience.
If the aim is to improve the lives of as many people as possible, it takes more to justify a more expensive project, than just: it will be faster.
My primary concern as a politician would be which solution can be affordable and adequate for the largest number of people who do not currently have something adequate.
Upload is the key--not download.
email, online services, graphical online services, the web, limewire etc., bittorrent etc.
It's not about what everybody can create. It's about what a select few can create.
The goal is to give the same tools to the person in the middle of nowhere as if they were the most connected person on the planet.
Luckily I have FIOS but my parents are stuck on really crappy DSL or mediocre cable.
For a marginal additional cost, you can run it down the street to every house, and consumers aren't forced into a artificial-scarcity "purchase by the gigabyte" scheme run by wireless carriers.
When I had fiber installed at my house, it took just half a day to run it about half a mile down the main road to my subdivision. It took another half a day to run it 200 feet down my side road, and another half a day to trench it under my driveway. With a base station you can perform the first step once and cover dozens of houses (even more townhouses or apartments). With fiber, you’d have to do the second step half a dozen more times, and the third step dozens of more times.
Rollout costs follow an almost power law[1] when you chart FTTP, FTTB, FTTC, FTTN[0] connection costs
[0] to the premisis, basement, curb and node respectively
[1] best quick cite - https://edge.alluremedia.com.au/m/l/2017/02/NBNyo.jpg
Cable/Fibre does not have this problem.
While I appreciate what they're trying to do, this comes off as ridiculous to those of us who actually have built or build parts of the internet.
The TLDR of this article is "With current technology you can move more bits with light and electrons than you can with RF", which is likely to stay true for the forseeable future.
What they left out is that most fiber service providers use PON, which doesn't give you the top end of what your physical fiber can do.
Here's a handy article about it: https://www.electronicdesign.com/what-s-difference-between/w...
This is almost as bad as "the internet is a series of tubes" to a network engineer...
If you have last mile fiber into your home, then you're capable if receiving 10Tbps. Yes a PON setup won't actually provide that, but they never state that someone would offer those speeds, only the theoretical last mile capacity.
The point of the article is to counter lobbyist claims that we don't need fibre investment because cable and 5g are fast enough. This article points out that even in their best case that is not true.
The Cable/Wireless carriers will use this misdetermination to undermine what these guys are saying so in the end its unhelpful.
They'd have a much better time pointing out that existing cableco's have mismanaged their DOCSIS networks and that Comcast is considered the WORST company in this country (even worse than Monsanto) because of how poorly they manage their networks. There's also so little adoption for "Wireless to the Home" that its pointless to consider that a reasonable option.
I can tell you this -> Any time anything network/internet infrastructure gets posted here on HN, its a mess. My friends in NANOG have stopped bothering.
My experience with all three techs from an Outside Plant aspect, tells me that Fiber probably would be the toughest for an outside party to snoop on (i.e. biggest physical access to network requirements)
You can tap fiber passively by "simply" cutting some of the jacket off and bending the fiber or installing a fiber tap.
From what I understand about 5G, there's some amount of encryption between the phone and tower, and tower and the PSTN so it could technically be safer from a surveillance POV. But in the end the 5G tower will be fed by fiber anyways.
If someone is tapping the physical media instead of having CALEA, you've got a bigger problem than how its tapped...
Wireless last-mile always seemed like a false argument against municipal fiber on behalf of very profitable wireless carriers