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The main problem with gigabit is that the person on the other end of the line doesn't have gigabit. If someone with 10MBps upload sends me a file, it's still co

by Apreche 10y ago

The main problem with gigabit is that the person on the other end of the line doesn't have gigabit. If someone with 10MBps upload sends me a file, it's still coming in at 10MBps, even if I've got a terabit connection. Likewise, you can't build an application that requires such tremendous bandwidth unless you know there are enough customers out there who have it. A few small towns here and there aren't going to cut it. Light up the wires in New York City, and then you'll see some action.

zokier 10y ago
> Likewise, you can't build an application that requires such tremendous bandwidth unless you know there are enough customers out there who have it. A few small towns here and there aren't going to cut it. From the article > about 14 percent of Americans have access to gigabit speeds today. That is quite a bit more than "few small towns here and there", and frankly nearly 50M people (just in US, globally much much more) should be more than enough for building user base.
- GauntletWizard 10y ago
  Those numbers probably vastly inflated (The FCC defines access only by zip-code, and there were many zipcodes with just a few homes given access to broadband to game the numbers for many years), and "Access" is not the same as "having" to many, especially as services that take advantage of gigabit have not yet become available, in a chicken->egg problem. There's an interesting condundrum - I want my parents to have instant access to a variety of photos and videos that I produce, and for a while it looked like fiber networks were going to be the way - I'd host a home fileserver, and they'd be able to stream whatever they wanted to me from there. But my home internet speeds have actually gone down over the years - Was on a 100mbit connection, and now the plan is '50/50' that rarely achieves more than 10 up. The cloud has become the distribution network, and it makes a lot of sense in many ways - It also works as a handy backup mechanism, and I trust 'cloud' services to keep good copies of my data more than I trust the second hard-drive I used to keep around.

by Apreche 10y ago

zokier 10y ago

> Likewise, you can't build an application that requires such tremendous bandwidth unless you know there are enough customers out there who have it. A few small towns here and there aren't going to cut it. From the article > about 14 percent of Americans have access to gigabit speeds today. That is quite a bit more than "few small towns here and there", and frankly nearly 50M people (just in US, globally much much more) should be more than enough for building user base.

GauntletWizard 10y ago
Those numbers probably vastly inflated (The FCC defines access only by zip-code, and there were many zipcodes with just a few homes given access to broadband to game the numbers for many years), and "Access" is not the same as "having" to many, especially as services that take advantage of gigabit have not yet become available, in a chicken->egg problem. There's an interesting condundrum - I want my parents to have instant access to a variety of photos and videos that I produce, and for a while it looked like fiber networks were going to be the way - I'd host a home fileserver, and they'd be able to stream whatever they wanted to me from there. But my home internet speeds have actually gone down over the years - Was on a 100mbit connection, and now the plan is '50/50' that rarely achieves more than 10 up. The cloud has become the distribution network, and it makes a lot of sense in many ways - It also works as a handy backup mechanism, and I trust 'cloud' services to keep good copies of my data more than I trust the second hard-drive I used to keep around.