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Fiber is a waste of money at this point. I just got gigabit and it has essentially no marginal value compared to my only 75mbit connection. Most consumer hardwa

Fiber is a waste of money at this point. I just got gigabit and it has essentially no marginal value compared to my only 75mbit connection. Most consumer hardware can't really do jack shit with it. The killer app is DSL reports speed tests. Money is better spent on anything, but something like low carbon energy would be a much better use of it. Really, we should focus on getting any broadband to areas that don't have any. Rather than upgrading people with cable internet to gigabit.

bsder 9y ago
> Fiber is a waste of money at this point. I just got gigabit and it has essentially no marginal value compared to my only 75mbit connection. Most consumer hardware can't really do jack shit with it. 1) The benefit is to businesses first, not necessarily consumers. Solid telepresence would allow specialists in various fields (medicine, engineering, etc.) to be located away from the big cities. It would also allow businesses to locate away from the big cities. 2) Part of the reason we don't have new applications is that so few people have gigabit (especially upload). Why write an application that requires gigabit when nobody will use it? Every order of magnitude jump in communication upload speed spawned something new in technology usage that we couldn't see at the time. 300 baud -> email, BBS 9.6K baud -> graphical Internet 128K baud -> napster, MP3 1.0M baud -> video So, what is waiting at 10M (we're just getting here in the rural areas and it's patchy), 100M, or 1G upload?
- slilo 9y ago
  > So, what is waiting at 10M (we're just getting here in the rural areas and it's patchy), 100M, or 1G upload? VR!
- rhino369 9y ago
  But all of those things had a previous non-internet use. It's not like people got cable modems and were shocked to discover that video was a good use for the internet. We all saw it coming. We got broadband to do video and large file downloads. Stuff like telepresence doesn't require anywhere near gigabit. I'm sure eventually there will be a need, but it's not today.

bsder 9y ago

> Fiber is a waste of money at this point. I just got gigabit and it has essentially no marginal value compared to my only 75mbit connection. Most consumer hardware can't really do jack shit with it. 1) The benefit is to businesses first, not necessarily consumers. Solid telepresence would allow specialists in various fields (medicine, engineering, etc.) to be located away from the big cities. It would also allow businesses to locate away from the big cities. 2) Part of the reason we don't have new applications is that so few people have gigabit (especially upload). Why write an application that requires gigabit when nobody will use it? Every order of magnitude jump in communication upload speed spawned something new in technology usage that we couldn't see at the time. 300 baud -> email, BBS 9.6K baud -> graphical Internet 128K baud -> napster, MP3 1.0M baud -> video So, what is waiting at 10M (we're just getting here in the rural areas and it's patchy), 100M, or 1G upload?

slilo 9y ago
> So, what is waiting at 10M (we're just getting here in the rural areas and it's patchy), 100M, or 1G upload? VR!
rhino369 9y ago
But all of those things had a previous non-internet use. It's not like people got cable modems and were shocked to discover that video was a good use for the internet. We all saw it coming. We got broadband to do video and large file downloads. Stuff like telepresence doesn't require anywhere near gigabit. I'm sure eventually there will be a need, but it's not today.