2 ms·

If you upgrade every house from copper wire that can pull 10 mb/s down to gigabit fiber, all of your backbone network needs to get boosted. That's not cheap.

• amazon_not 11y ago
  Not cheap in absolute dollars, but not expensive in the grand scheme of things. Backhaul and IP transit are fairly small expenditures compared to the last mile. There's the 90/9/1 rule of thumb for expenses in last mile/backhaul/IP transit. Furthermore a gigabit fiber customer does not on average use 100x more bandwidth than a 10M copper customer. There is only a small multiple.
  • douche 11y ago
    Could very well be true. I'm mostly going off what I was told by relatives of an ex-girlfriend, who were fairly high up in ATT engineering and loved to brag about how much captial expenditure and investment into infrastructure ATT was making. I suspect that the networks are already woefully underprovisioned for the level of traffic they are already selling. I'm supposed to have 25/5 cable internet, but I've never been able to get more than about 20% of that in practice.
• twistedpair 11y ago
  True, but once that glass is hooked up, we can use it for the next 40+ years and just swap out transceivers. No more need to upgrade the stuff in the ground. As for backhaul, you can cram 8Tbps+ over each individual fiber, if you need to (like they do for undersea links). So, every X years, you just swap out the racks in some IDF and get 10x-100x the backhaul capacity. In the near term, 1Gbps it plenty for home use. We can drop ship you a 10Gb setup in 2025 when you need it.