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Comment by liotier | Hacker News Reader

> Yup, always run extra everything

Cables ain't free, duct capacity is finite and duct rental from the local incumbent is costly too... Please calculate the financial optimum of pay now vs. pay later - taking into account growth, various forms of attrition, cost of capital, opportunity costs and appetite for risk. Or everyone would be running 1152 strands cables everywhere.

But then I see that from a telco perspective and, now that I've read the article, it seems to be from a small-scale hosting perspective - entirely different economics.

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Duct capacity is finite, but fiber cables are tiny and they are very nearly free compared to the cost of having them run.

Not quite tiny - a basic armored (rats !) 12 strands cable may be around 10-15 millimeters, whereas similarly specced cables in the 500 strands range might reach 20-30 mm. In crowded Paris downtown, it adds up fast. On the countryside, that is a lot more weight to hang on poles.

    > Paris downtown

Where is downtown Paris? 1/2/3 arrondissement? I never heard the term used for Paris. Mostly, it is used to describe the Wall Street area of Manhattan (NYC) as the island is relatively north-south and Wall Street is on the southern end.

It’s also come to mean the densest part of any city. Even the town I group up in would call the densest part “downtown”, even though the only buildings taller than two stories were city hall and the historic theater.

Today I learned!

I always thought "downtown" and "uptown" were more like "south from X" and "north from X" where X is some reference point in context (e.g. "where I'm standing"). Turns out, it's more similar to "downwell" and "upwell", i.e. towards or away from some central point (gravity wells being spherical-ish and all).

Uptown can mean anything out of: geographically north, upstream on a river, higher elevation, or higher income and wealth of the residents.

It just so happens that for Manhattan which is the most famous uptown, all four of those indicators point in the same direction. In general I think an area would more likely be called an uptown if it met more of those criteria relative to some downtown. (And there would be correlation, wealthier residents would buy higher-elevation land.)

I notice that non US English-speaking tend to use the term CBD instead of downtown, my assumption is that it is because of the NYC thing you mention

British people would say city centre or town centre.

Australians are the ones who say CBD.

I've seen it in Canada, NZ and India as well. Def not AU specific.

New Orleans seems to like giving directions relative to it's CBD (just south of the French Quarter). It's otherwise not common here in the US.

In New Zealand we refer to it as the CBD, but you could also say city centre or town centre (or just “town”).

Not sure I have ever heard downtown being used to refer to part of a New Zealand city although I understand its meaning.

I don't think there's any association with New York. etymonline claims that "downtown" originally refers to the idea that the suburbs are at a higher elevation than the city proper. I don't know how much stock I'd put in that, but I trust it more than someone's random intuition about the geography of New York.

( https://www.etymonline.com/word/downtown : "The notion is originally literal, of suburbs built on heights around a city." )

It's the only available word for the concept in American English. I wouldn't recommend saying CBD; that would refer to cannabidiol or to marijuana in general.

Reading more about it, accounts vary. There are historians who posit it was in fact inspired by Manhattan, or maybe Boston, but it's not cut and dry.

Edit forgot link: https://downtownny.com/news/where-did-downtown-come-from/

I'm not especially impressed by the argument "if we assume it came from Manhattan, then we can know it came from Manhattan":

> Let’s suppose that Fosdick, incoherent from distress, forgot to include the words “to the” between “down” and “town” when describing the direction in which people were fleeing. With this in mind, we can assume that Lower Manhattan is in fact the original “downtown,” as posited by Schwarzer, and that the possible Bostonian origin of the word is simply a misunderstanding.

I'm also frustrated by the lack of sourcing here but the wiki article for downtown [1] also points to Manhattan, citing a book I don't have a copy of. Allegedly it was in use in Manhattan in the 1830s, which aligns with the date given by the etymology entry linked previously.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtown

https://www.etymonline.com/word/downtown The word was in want of a closer look in fresh archives. On a closer search, it's older (at least 1780s), American, but not apparently a New York reference at first.

Interesting. I would use the ability to get 40x the strands for 4x the weight as evidence against extra strands adding up fast.

And while some people preach hard-wired everything I’d probably increasingly not bother at home. . I’ll have to see how much networking and audio stuff I even do given a kitchen fire with s

Maybe in an apartment. In a house, you want wired backhaul on access points, and wired streaming devices.

Why? Is this an actual problem? I have a bunch of wired connections (or at least had) but I'm not sure I ever saw a difference and I'm certainly not going to spend time or money retrofitting them for some Platonic ideal--ADDED, at least in recent years or outside of specific situations.

It's potentially a problem in a typical brick house in Europe.

I'm sure it's less of a problem in houses with other materials.

The answer is brick and concrete. You’d be amazed how well a load bearing wall in a high rise will block a signal.

Which are, of course, also difficult to retrofit with a lot of new wiring. Old plaster lath is something of an issue too but not nearly as much and is easier to retrofit--or just replace.

For me it's the metal studs in my walls. WiFi reception is truly awful. Fortunately it was prewired with Cat5e. But that will need to be replaced some day.

Latency. WiFi latency can spike which ruins video calls. Simple speed (given lots of time) on the other hand is rarely a problem.

There’s also the problem of sometimes, video calls just stutter and seize up and it’s the internet’s fault, not the local network. But with a wired connection, I am immediately confident the problem is not in my network. With WiFi, who knows, maybe it’s my fault. I used to continuously ping the router so I could verify this, and indeed ping spikes would happen. Now with a wired connection I don’t worry about this.

But yeah if you run no latency-sensitive applications, WiFi might be fine.

WiFi is convenient and (usually) cheaper (esp if it's a retrofit), but not deterministic. And less 'cluttered' I guess, if that's your pet peeve. All sorts of things can muck around with Wifi speed, reliability and latency and most people have little or no ability to troubleshoot it effectively.

I retrofit wired my house[1] about 20 years ago; I only have had a small handful of issues with it in that time (all basically mechanical fatigue of jacks). If I have speed, latency or connectivity issues, I can be reasonably sure the last thing I have to debug is the physical network.

[1] Copper, not fiber, but no runs are over 50m. Works to 10G so far. I used a Leviton residential structured wiring system (network, coax and phone at the time; the last 2 long since obsoleted). I did a lot myself since I'd done enough quality time in datacenters to be adequately proficient with low voltage Cat5. Not cheap but not extravagant.

I just had luck and have my ISP modem close to my desktop PC and desk so I run cable to desktop, laptop dock, TV and consoles all on the same wall.

So worth it as in apartment everyone and everything is blasting wifi. I see like 20+ SSIDs.

Or, take the money you would spend calculating that, and that's the amount you spend for your margin.

Haha, I'll tell that to the outside plant capacity planning team !

But seriously, I'm telco-biased, and it seems that the article has a small scale hosting... Different worlds. At small scale, sure - the bigger cable is a rounding error.

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