Smasharoo wrote:
What happens with networks is precisely what happens with road systems. It doesn't matter how wide your street is from your house to the freeway, or how many streets there are, or even if we run a separate street from each persons house to the freeway. The bottleneck will always be the onramp that you and all the folks traveling along all the roads leading to that onramp all have to share. You're doing the equivalent of wondering why it takes you an hour to commute to work since you paid for a really wide driveway. Um... It's not the driveway that's the problem.
Yeah, again, no.
Sigh...
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Bandwidth costs virtually nothing, maintaining fiber costs virtually nothing.
Um... No. Fiber is quite expensive, both the physical cable and the connections.
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You can run it 100 miles to the CO and plug it into a blade in a backbone switch without any additional overhead.
Except for the physical cost of the cable itself. And the cost to run the cable. And, more significantly, you have to plug the damn cable into something. There aren't an infinite number of "somethings" to just plug cables into. You get that you can't just splice fiber optic cables together into one big cable and magically have a trunkline or something. Every single fiber optic cable has to plug into a connector. And every single connector has to have sufficient smarts to transfer the pulses of light traveling down that cable into new pulses of light traveling down the bundle of cables that are on the back end of that switch.
That's not only not "free", it's freaking expensive as hell.
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Verizon is a Tier 1 carrier, they have no incentive to oversubscribe FIOS, and really given the economics, it'd be hard for them to even manage it.
Yes, numbskull. Which is why they really aren't just running a length of cable directly from your house into a backbone (no matter how far away it is). They're running it like a quarter mile to their local switch, along with all the other users in that quarter mile radius. That switch then runs a single higher capacity line to another layer of switch, which in turn runs to another switch, which maybe then finally has a big fat pipe that runs into a true backbone.
You don't understand a damn thing about network architecture. I do. No one, and I mean
no one, just runs wire directly from each individuals house to the top tier of their network. If for no other reason than you'd end up with a bundle of fiber cable 100 feet wide by the time you got there.
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I guess they could intentionally degrade end user connections for absolutely no reason, but, amazingly they don't. Fiber goes from my ONT to a passive splitter to the CO, to a backbone switch. That's it. Why so simple? Because it's not fucking copper. Because there doesn't need to be an elaborate system of repeaters overlaid on existing analog infrastructure to support it. There's no trunk involved, you just plug it in.
Yeah. That's not how it works. Again. Think about how many users there are in a given physical area. Then think about how many individual fiber cables they'd need to run every single one of them directly to the nearest segment of backbone trunkline. Then realize how monumentally stupid your idea is.
It doesn't matter if it's fiber or copper. The basic assumptions and cost effects are the same. I'm frankly not sure why you'd think that fiber is some magical thing that somehow changes all the rules. It's not. At the end of the day, it's a cable down which data can be sent and received. There's no magic.
Fiber to the end user is largely a marketing scheme. It's mostly being incorporated by providers who are behind on infrastructure and need to upgrade. So, if you're going to spend the money digging up the street, you may as well run the latest and greatest wire, right? And they can charge 2-3 times as much to the customer for giving them "fiber to the house". And certainly, this process also involves upgrading their switch clouds along the way (so there is generally going to be an actual increase in overall performance). But at the end of the day, the same cost restrictions still apply. They don't magically go away because you're laying a different type of wire.
Edited, Feb 14th 2014 3:18pm by gbaji