Good Question: Why Is Our Internet So Slow?

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I founnd this pretty interesting.
Would it ever be possible to replace all the coaxial cable in America with Fiber Optic?

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Paul Boz

If $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ wasn't an issue, yes.

RobertKaucher

And then they will be able to clog it with even more spam.

earweed

The average they're talking about includes people with crappy DSL like I do because I don't have cable. I pay more now than I did for the cable where I used to live. I dl'd Windows 7 before I moved and it was pretty quick, dl'd Ubuntu since I moved (relearning Linux) and it took hours.
So true about $$$. If it were a true competitive market we'd have faster internet and cheaper prices.

tiersten

What Paul said. You could give everybody in the US a GigE+ connection at home/work with a network core capable of handling it all if you wanted but you'd spend the GDP of a small country doing it.

tiersten

earweed wrote: »

So true about $$$. If it were a true competitive market we'd have faster internet and cheaper prices.

Up to a certain point. Laying fiber/cables isn't cheap and you'd need to rip out a lot of old infrastructure to do the upgrade which also won't be cheap. Even with competition, the carriers will be limited in how cheap they can price the service otherwise they'd never recoup their initial investment in upgrading the network infrastructure.

earweed

tiersten wrote: »

Up to a certain point. Laying fiber/cables isn't cheap and you'd need to rip out a lot of old infrastructure to do the upgrade which also won't be cheap. Even with competition, the carriers will be limited in how cheap they can price the service otherwise they'd never recoup their initial investment in upgrading the network infrastructure.

True, but i was ranting more about my personal situation than the big picture. Even if just cable were provided in more areas it would help. There's no competition for ATT DSL in my area so I pay $$$.

Paul Boz

It's the magnitude of cost involved that is so hard. At my last job I was a network engineer on a true fiber to the home network. We spanned one parish (county for you non-LA people) and it cost us $35m to build out. See, you can't just rip up the copper infrastructure and run fiber to the home. You have different requirements.

If you're a telco you have FCC mandated regulations about how long someone has battery on their phone line after the power goes out. With traditional POTS lines this isn't an issue because they carry their own battery. However, with Fiberoptic service you have to install a new DMARC called an ONT, then install a UPS battery backup to provide power to the ONT so you maintain phone service if the commercial power goes out. An ONT costs several times more than a standard POTS dmarc. If a POTS dmarc is $20, a fiber ONT is $120. then you have to run a data line to a new jack for terminating ethernet because there's no modem involved. Let me sum up one residential household installation:

a1. Install an ONT and run fiber from the pedestal to the home
a2. Install a battery backup either inside or outside of the home (external batteries cost 2x)
a3. Run an ethernet line into the house and terminate it at a new jack

This initial rollout can cost up to a thousand dollars per household before labor. You can see how this scales out of control quickly.

Then you have to factor the cost of upgrading the infrastructure for the buildout. You have to replace your DSLAMS and CMTS (in the case of cable) with fiber muxes. These guys cost several hundred thousand dollars each depending on the density. then you have to integrate the fiber network with your traditional network which requires new routers and switches to interface the networks.

Oh yeah, you also have to address density loss. As you move out of dense areas your costs dramatically increase do to a lack of density on the infrastructure. It's way cheaper to install a $200,000 fiber mux with 10k users in it than to install a $200,000 fiber mux in the boonies with 2.5k users in it.

The reason why countries like Korea and Japan have blazing speeds is because their density supports it. America is too big for this model.

Kaminsky

In the UK, BT are already undergoing a mass roll out of fibre to the roadside. Another green cabinet for fibre to the exchange will start appearing near the usual copper one and be cross connected. However, from the copper road side cabinet up the telegraph poles and into the individual homes will still stay on copper so will still be a limitation on how high they will be able to hike up the bandwidth. I'm not sure they will remove the existing copper trunks to the exchange but will just add fibre cores in the same cable runs under the pavements. I was hoping one day we would see an end to the spiders web of copper lines above our streets. Oh well.

With the current sizes of adsl up and down speeds, it always reminds me of back in the day when PCs were becoming more common and people thought why on earth would anyone ever want more than 256k memory ??

Hyper-Me

One of the larger problems is how rural the US is compared to cities that are built up rather than out, like in Japan.

Kaminsky

Hyper-Me wrote: »

One of the larger problems is how rural the US is compared to cities that are built up rather than out, like in Japan.

When I was in the sates last year, I was in a hotel on the edge of town and during the week, loads of plant machinery turned up and started levelling this huge crop field nearby preparing to build something. In the UK you would be burnt at the stake for that.

US is so big, except for population centres, everything expands outwards which must make cheap connections a nightmare.

dynamik

Are you guys sure it's not because our tubes are clogged? I mean, it's not like the internet is a **** truck...

MentholMoose

So should the telcos do nothing? There are plenty of high density areas that could be wired up, should they suffer because the rest is unprofitable?

Maybe FTTH just isn't feasible, but what about FTTN? Cablecos mostly already use HFC infrastructure and can push decent speeds over coax. AT&T is rolling out U-Verse which also does decent speed.