3 ms·

I agree with pretty much 100% of what you've said there - but fiber doesn't need to have the mystery of being really expensive... Not for houses, but for commer

I agree with pretty much 100% of what you've said there - but fiber doesn't need to have the mystery of being really expensive... Not for houses, but for commercial use, if you spend the money one time to buy a fusion splicer and good tool kit, some basic consumables, two strand singlemode is actually 1/3rd the price per meter of cat6. Due to it being so cheap to manufacture and the cost of copper being high right now. Done correctly you have a guaranteed hassle free upgrade path as far as 100GbE and 400GbE on the same fiber, patch cables, patch panel, etc. But for residential use, one of the primary needs to run an ethernet connection to different places in the house is for an 802.11ac/ax (or whatever next generation AP), so fiber doesn't really solve the problem because you still need electrical power for the AP. Obviously one cable and 802.3af/at/bt PoE is a better idea than running fiber powering each AP off AC power wherever it's mounted. Aside from the fact that APs except for very, very expensive enterprise ones don't come with SFP/SFP+ ports, and are generally designed around the concept of being powered from the switch they're connected to anyways. One of the reasons why i really strongly agree with your points is that in a residential environment it's going to be very, very difficult to really move throughput through an 802.11ac/ax AP that gets anywhere near stressing the speeds of a 2.5 or 5GBaseT connection in the future. I'd be fairly confident in saying that a house wired today with cat6a at sub 50 meter lengths, that tests OK for 5GBaseT, will probably be good for the next 25-30 years.

015a 6y ago
The big thing for me is, its easy to say "oh, fiber is future proofing". Alright, can't argue with that; just as its impossible to predict the future to say fiber is the correct choice for the future, its also impossible for me to say that it isn't. But, I strongly suspect it won't be necessary in our lifetimes. The primary reason I suspect this is on both ends of the internet delivery spectrum: First; I think the broad resource allocation focus over the next 10-15 years in the US will be getting "the bottom 80%" up to 100Mbps+ speeds; not getting the "top 20%" beyond 1Gbps. Many of the traditional ground-line companies who would be doing this work (Comcast, Spectrum, etc) are going to be experiencing pressure from emerging wireless technology that can meet these speeds, with beyond-adequate latency, at a fair price, and require far less infrastructure work (Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile 5G, Starlink) (Starlink is a wild one; you're competing against the gravity well of the planet at that point; what can any of these companies who are "good at digging holes in the ground" do?). Sitting in my new apartment here, I have AT&T home internet. Averages ~50/10 @ 25ms. I was told on the phone it would be 200 down. "Well, the lines in this building are so long, very old, we ran some tests and we can sell you the 100 plan, but you probably wont get those speeds reliably, you'd be better off on the cheaper 50 plan". Ok, fine. Let me run a speedtest on my phone here, Verizon 5G, 125/50 @ 10ms. The cell companies can just put up a tower, cover hundreds of people with really freakin' good internet, sell it as home internet, what are the cable companies supposed to do against that? Spend thousands of dollars re-tooling the wires in this old building to get "just as good" internet to six people, half of whom won't pay for it? And the key thing there, these emerging wireless internet technologies won't breach gigabit for decades. Its difficult enough getting them to gigabit. Part of the reason they won't is on the other end; we're hitting the point, very quickly, where Bill Gates' old misattributed "64k should be enough" quote is becoming true; just not 64k, more like "4K video". Would having 5Gbps internet, instead of 1Gbps (which I had just a few days ago) actually fundamentally change how I interface with content online? Not even close. Even 100Mbps doesn't; there's a point where internet just hits "yup, that's good enough". Cool, I can download Warzone in an hour instead of four hours; its the same thing at the end of the day. An argument could be made that continuing to push internet forward will open up more innovation in content delivery; whether that's game streaming, 8K video, actually decent quality 4K video, whatever. I think this is tenuous as well, because a big bottleneck for many content providers is networking costs on their end. So much money has been (rightly!) dumped into making our (mostly privatized) nationwide internet backbone "resilient", that suddenly its gotten very expensive to egress data from most hosting providers (big cloud certainly, but even small cloud and colo providers). A high quality 4K video stream can saturate a 100Mbps line; as an end user, that sounds great, I've got a 100Mbps line! But as a service provider, you multiply that 100Mbps by XXX,XXX users, and the numbers start looking really scary. That situation will not improve in the next 1-3 decades; the focus right now is in algorithms to get the same quality in lower bandwidth, not just pushing more bandwidth. Plus, applications like Game Streaming are both bandwidth intensive and latency intensive. So, double-edged sword, and one that the emerging wireless home internet technologies won't solve well. Having whole-home 40Gbps fiber or a 5Gbps uplink won't help you with Stadia. Point being, I think arguably for the rest of our lifetimes, the internet as a whole is going to enter a holding pattern while we catch everyone else up with acceptable speeds, improve the width of the backbone (not just the "depth" e.g. fallovers and resiliency), which includes 10-100xing edge distribution, and improve underlying algorithms to reduce the size of content while maintaining quality. All of this will be prioritized above widespread 10Gbps to the home.

015a 6y ago

The big thing for me is, its easy to say "oh, fiber is future proofing". Alright, can't argue with that; just as its impossible to predict the future to say fiber is the correct choice for the future, its also impossible for me to say that it isn't. But, I strongly suspect it won't be necessary in our lifetimes. The primary reason I suspect this is on both ends of the internet delivery spectrum: First; I think the broad resource allocation focus over the next 10-15 years in the US will be getting "the bottom 80%" up to 100Mbps+ speeds; not getting the "top 20%" beyond 1Gbps. Many of the traditional ground-line companies who would be doing this work (Comcast, Spectrum, etc) are going to be experiencing pressure from emerging wireless technology that can meet these speeds, with beyond-adequate latency, at a fair price, and require far less infrastructure work (Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile 5G, Starlink) (Starlink is a wild one; you're competing against the gravity well of the planet at that point; what can any of these companies who are "good at digging holes in the ground" do?). Sitting in my new apartment here, I have AT&T home internet. Averages ~50/10 @ 25ms. I was told on the phone it would be 200 down. "Well, the lines in this building are so long, very old, we ran some tests and we can sell you the 100 plan, but you probably wont get those speeds reliably, you'd be better off on the cheaper 50 plan". Ok, fine. Let me run a speedtest on my phone here, Verizon 5G, 125/50 @ 10ms. The cell companies can just put up a tower, cover hundreds of people with really freakin' good internet, sell it as home internet, what are the cable companies supposed to do against that? Spend thousands of dollars re-tooling the wires in this old building to get "just as good" internet to six people, half of whom won't pay for it? And the key thing there, these emerging wireless internet technologies won't breach gigabit for decades. Its difficult enough getting them to gigabit. Part of the reason they won't is on the other end; we're hitting the point, very quickly, where Bill Gates' old misattributed "64k should be enough" quote is becoming true; just not 64k, more like "4K video". Would having 5Gbps internet, instead of 1Gbps (which I had just a few days ago) actually fundamentally change how I interface with content online? Not even close. Even 100Mbps doesn't; there's a point where internet just hits "yup, that's good enough". Cool, I can download Warzone in an hour instead of four hours; its the same thing at the end of the day. An argument could be made that continuing to push internet forward will open up more innovation in content delivery; whether that's game streaming, 8K video, actually decent quality 4K video, whatever. I think this is tenuous as well, because a big bottleneck for many content providers is networking costs on their end. So much money has been (rightly!) dumped into making our (mostly privatized) nationwide internet backbone "resilient", that suddenly its gotten very expensive to egress data from most hosting providers (big cloud certainly, but even small cloud and colo providers). A high quality 4K video stream can saturate a 100Mbps line; as an end user, that sounds great, I've got a 100Mbps line! But as a service provider, you multiply that 100Mbps by XXX,XXX users, and the numbers start looking really scary. That situation will not improve in the next 1-3 decades; the focus right now is in algorithms to get the same quality in lower bandwidth, not just pushing more bandwidth. Plus, applications like Game Streaming are both bandwidth intensive and latency intensive. So, double-edged sword, and one that the emerging wireless home internet technologies won't solve well. Having whole-home 40Gbps fiber or a 5Gbps uplink won't help you with Stadia. Point being, I think arguably for the rest of our lifetimes, the internet as a whole is going to enter a holding pattern while we catch everyone else up with acceptable speeds, improve the width of the backbone (not just the "depth" e.g. fallovers and resiliency), which includes 10-100xing edge distribution, and improve underlying algorithms to reduce the size of content while maintaining quality. All of this will be prioritized above widespread 10Gbps to the home.