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That's not true. Single mode fiber installed decades ago (for sure the early 90s) can still trivially be used to drive 10G and even 100G over reasonable distan

That's not true. Single mode fiber installed decades ago (for sure the early 90s) can still trivially be used to drive 10G and even 100G over reasonable distances. It's a question of how the fiber network is laid out and designed. If you're doing things with any kind of PON components in "the field" you're limiting yourself to a lifetime measured in a decade or two. If you're doing things with active components in the field you're limiting yourself to a lifetime of a decade at most. If you do things with just fiber to each house to a central location with each run under the optical budget of a 40/80k optic that infrastructure will probably last for 100 years. I do agree however that to decide to do this in the 1980s would have been an impossible leap in logic for any government and judging them for not doing it based on what we know now is entirely unfair. Technically however, it would have been very very possible.

martinald 5y ago
But assuming it wasn't a PON back then and was direct fibre to each house, the cost of the CPE would have been absolutely enormous back in the 90s and 2000s. The copper network would have been ripped out. Instead of ADSL in the early 2000s (which was "fine") you'd have had catastrophically expensive active fibre equipment which would have made broadband completely unaffordable for the masses. I can guarantee everyone would be saying what a complete mistake this white elephant fibre network was when ADSL would have been a fraction of the price. If you'd had a PON network there is no way that they would have planned the network in the 80s like you do now for FTTH. The segments would have been enormous and completely overcontended in the 2000s bandwidth boom. It would have required extremely expensive network reconfiguration to split the PONs down - the fibres would be going to the wrong place.
- AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
  In the 80s maybe, in the 90s it was reasonably cheap to do 100Mbit over 40k fiber.
  - martinald 5y ago
    Was there any large scale consumer FTTH in the 90s (or even early 2000s)? I am sure the nordics had some very fast speeds but it was typically FTTB (fibre to an apartment block, then ethernet to each apartment).
- dangerface 5y ago
  We know from countries that did go the fibre route that it actualy works out cheaper than trying to maintain a copper network as the copper you replace can be sold for almost as much as it costs to replace with fibre.
  - martinald 5y ago
    But noone went the fibre route in 1990. To my knowledge only widespread FTTH happened in the early 2000s, at which point there was affordable PON equipment. My point is that how you'd plan a FTTH network in 1990 would be radically different to how you would do it even 10 years later. There is a chance that you could have planned it entirely wrong given the changes in technology which came about rapidly after that.

martinald 5y ago

But assuming it wasn't a PON back then and was direct fibre to each house, the cost of the CPE would have been absolutely enormous back in the 90s and 2000s. The copper network would have been ripped out. Instead of ADSL in the early 2000s (which was "fine") you'd have had catastrophically expensive active fibre equipment which would have made broadband completely unaffordable for the masses. I can guarantee everyone would be saying what a complete mistake this white elephant fibre network was when ADSL would have been a fraction of the price. If you'd had a PON network there is no way that they would have planned the network in the 80s like you do now for FTTH. The segments would have been enormous and completely overcontended in the 2000s bandwidth boom. It would have required extremely expensive network reconfiguration to split the PONs down - the fibres would be going to the wrong place.

AdamJacobMuller 5y ago
In the 80s maybe, in the 90s it was reasonably cheap to do 100Mbit over 40k fiber.
- martinald 5y ago
  Was there any large scale consumer FTTH in the 90s (or even early 2000s)? I am sure the nordics had some very fast speeds but it was typically FTTB (fibre to an apartment block, then ethernet to each apartment).
dangerface 5y ago
We know from countries that did go the fibre route that it actualy works out cheaper than trying to maintain a copper network as the copper you replace can be sold for almost as much as it costs to replace with fibre.
- martinald 5y ago
  But noone went the fibre route in 1990. To my knowledge only widespread FTTH happened in the early 2000s, at which point there was affordable PON equipment. My point is that how you'd plan a FTTH network in 1990 would be radically different to how you would do it even 10 years later. There is a chance that you could have planned it entirely wrong given the changes in technology which came about rapidly after that.