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That's bad, but also interesting that you can have the world's main tech region without much fiber to home. Maybe fiber isn't really that important.

• volkk 8y ago
  > Maybe fiber isn't really that important. My gut feeling is that it is, but the current monopolies providing alternatives just haven't ruined the experience enough for this to be pursued heavily by people with deep pockets
  • adventured 8y ago
    What did Japan do with their vast broadband lead (which has now eroded entirely)? How did that dramatically benefit their economy? It didn't revolutionize their tech output, it didn't jump start their moribund economy. Finland has been among the ten fastest nations in regards to broadband speeds for a long time. That didn't do much for their economy as it languished in a near ten year recession. It didn't spur an epic tech buildout, it didn't help them keep pace with what Sweden has accomplished for example, with the two nations having similar broadband speeds. France has lagged extremely far behind in broadband, for two decades. They're among the worst in Europe at it. Does that mean their economy is doomed? They're well below Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, and Russia in Europe regarding broadband. And yet there's Bulgaria, with a GDP per capita 1/6th that of France, and an economy that hasn't net expanded in ten years (off that much smaller per capita economic base, with far better broadband, you'd expect to see dramatic growth results, and yet there are none). I think some healthy skepticism is warranted on the top end value proposition. Perhaps if you're down toward the bottom as in the case of France (in Europe), you do indeed suffer a meaningful penalty. Much of Latin America for example has very slow average Internet access speeds, I think that sort of outcome does harm their development potential. While common access to something like 50-100mbps cable may accomplish everything that 1gbps fiber does at this juncture for consumers and general economic development. Maybe that will change soon, such that FTTH becomes invaluable to get ahead economically, there's practically no evidence that it matters currently or has mattered much the last ten years. I like the idea of muni fiber programs, more competition, and universal access to 1gbps to the home; and yet I've never seen any evidence that the high cost of rapidly building that out is justified (vs gradually over time).
    • phil21 8y ago
      Of course it doesn't matter economically - when only a tiny fraction of a potential userbase has anything approaching gige to the home there is going to be zero application development based on those requirements. You may be entirely correct that "150mbps is good enough for anyone" - but based on watching capabilities grow with data speeds the past 35 years I'd bet heavily in the opposite direction. If 50% of Internet users in the US had uncapped gige I think you'd see some rather interesting tech start using it once they can rely on it.
      • sigstoat 8y ago
        > If 50% of Internet users in the US had uncapped gige I think you'd see some rather interesting tech start using it once they can rely on it. and yet nobody ever has the faintest idea what would be done with it, despite the fact that every office building has been internally wired for gigabit ethernet (or faster!) for >10 years. what is anyone doing at work with it? what is anyone doing across large corporate campuses like google's or facebook's with all their internal bandwidth?
  • thelastidiot 8y ago
    Com... cough cough, cast! That's an interesting theory and discussion topic. I was just wondering today what are my options about switching to a better ISP with all this net neutrality gone by the window and Comcast asking me to return my old router to get a new one so they can throttle me better?
• tzs 8y ago
  10-15 years ago, fiber to the home (FTTH) was hugely important because it was massively faster than cable (maybe two orders of magnitude) or DSL (three orders of magnitude). Nowadays cable is almost as fast. The same physical cable to my neighborhood that offered plans of up to 10 Mb/s 10 years ago is now giving me 500 Mb/s on my current plan, and it looks like 1000 Mb/s is available if I switch to a bundle that includes Comcast's home security service. Faster home internet has diminishing returns. With a 150 Mb/s service, you can have two parents and three kids each streaming a different 4k movie at the same time. You can download 67 GB of data in an hour. For most families the only time they will notice a difference between 150 Mb/s and gigabit is when someone needs to download a large file, such as when someone buys a major new game. An hour download at 150 Mb/s becomes under 10 minutes in gigabit. For most that only happens occasionally. The last couple of times that Comcast has raised my internet speed without changing my plan or cost, I've seriously considered dropping down to a less expensive plan that has my old speed. The only thing that stops me is that I have an internet/TV/phone bundle, and the bundles with my old speeds have smaller TV packages too, which are missing some of my most watched channels.
• shmerl 8y ago
  Fiber is important, but few are making long term investment to break current low quality monopolies that don't care about pulling fiber.
• gascan 8y ago
  It seems pretty clear municipal fiber is a reaction to poor quality of service, absent competition, and high pricing from the private copper, rather than a vital technological advancement. Though Longmont residents tell me it is fast. Really fast.