The article is correct that fiber connections can provide a higher bitrate than cable and 5G, but it fails to explain why that makes it a better social or economic proposition.
My 200Mb/s DOCSIS cable connection is well below the theoretical maximum, and is good enough for streaming 8K video, downloading a Linux distro in seconds, downloading a game in a few minutes, etc. The social effect of having this, versus 0.1Mb/s connectivity I had before is huge, but greater bandwidth would not greatly change my experience.
If the aim is to improve the lives of as many people as possible, it takes more to justify a more expensive project, than just: it will be faster.
My primary concern as a politician would be which solution can be affordable and adequate for the largest number of people who do not currently have something adequate.
Why is there no mention of the initial cost to lay down fiber? I expect that would be quite significant compared to wireless links and I am not even thinking of the costs that might be associated with maintenance of the fibers once it is laid down and operational.
The dirty secret of 5G is that they have to run fiber to every street corner anyway just to backhaul the very-short-range base stations.
For a marginal additional cost, you can run it down the street to every house, and consumers aren't forced into a artificial-scarcity "purchase by the gigabyte" scheme run by wireless carriers.
More like every several blocks in urban areas, and less dense than that in suburban areas. That’s a huge improvement over running fiber to each house, because the fan-out kills you.
When I had fiber installed at my house, it took just half a day to run it about half a mile down the main road to my subdivision. It took another half a day to run it 200 feet down my side road, and another half a day to trench it under my driveway. With a base station you can perform the first step once and cover dozens of houses (even more townhouses or apartments). With fiber, you’d have to do the second step half a dozen more times, and the third step dozens of more times.
The fiber line goes to your house then gets converted to Ethernet via a modem; just like cable does now. In fact when i had FIOS, the fiber was converted to coax before it came into may apartment, then went to the modem and cable box. So from a user perspective, it wasn't any different than cable.
This is such a superficial and terrible article, its like if you gave an intern an outline and they could only use wikipedia to complete it.
While I appreciate what they're trying to do, this comes off as ridiculous to those of us who actually have built or build parts of the internet.
The TLDR of this article is "With current technology you can move more bits with light and electrons than you can with RF", which is likely to stay true for the forseeable future.
What they left out is that most fiber service providers use PON, which doesn't give you the top end of what your physical fiber can do.
How do they not understand the technology? They clearly compared the theoretical max to each technology as options for last mile connectivity.
If you have last mile fiber into your home, then you're capable if receiving 10Tbps. Yes a PON setup won't actually provide that, but they never state that someone would offer those speeds, only the theoretical last mile capacity.
The point of the article is to counter lobbyist claims that we don't need fibre investment because cable and 5g are fast enough. This article points out that even in their best case that is not true.
They don't understand how PON works, think of it like FDDI or even DOCSIS; You'd never be capable of receiving 10Tbps due to fiber topology... The 10Tbps number requires DWDM anyways, its like saying a Kia is a Lamborghini.
The Cable/Wireless carriers will use this misdetermination to undermine what these guys are saying so in the end its unhelpful.
They'd have a much better time pointing out that existing cableco's have mismanaged their DOCSIS networks and that Comcast is considered the WORST company in this country (even worse than Monsanto) because of how poorly they manage their networks. There's also so little adoption for "Wireless to the Home" that its pointless to consider that a reasonable option.
I'm not sure I really understand your alternative. It's not like in practical terms, providers will achieve the theoretical max of RF or cable either. What are you suggesting instead?
You clearly know about this, but your comments are not very substantive. It might be more valuable to explain what the article is getting wrong. Many HN readers are fairly technical and interested in stuff like this.
Based on the downvoting, I'm unconvinced they're actually interested in this :)
I can tell you this -> Any time anything network/internet infrastructure gets posted here on HN, its a mess. My friends in NANOG have stopped bothering.
My facepalm is that a group like the EFF would likely want to point out the vulnerabilities in RF and 5G from a snooping standpoint.
My experience with all three techs from an Outside Plant aspect, tells me that Fiber probably would be the toughest for an outside party to snoop on (i.e. biggest physical access to network requirements)
Having done a reasonable amount of network debugging/tapping, IMHO its actually the hardest to tap copper networking equipment since its fairly signal sensitive.
You can tap fiber passively by "simply" cutting some of the jacket off and bending the fiber or installing a fiber tap.
From what I understand about 5G, there's some amount of encryption between the phone and tower, and tower and the PSTN so it could technically be safer from a surveillance POV. But in the end the 5G tower will be fed by fiber anyways.
If someone is tapping the physical media instead of having CALEA, you've got a bigger problem than how its tapped...
My 200Mb/s DOCSIS cable connection is well below the theoretical maximum, and is good enough for streaming 8K video, downloading a Linux distro in seconds, downloading a game in a few minutes, etc. The social effect of having this, versus 0.1Mb/s connectivity I had before is huge, but greater bandwidth would not greatly change my experience.
If the aim is to improve the lives of as many people as possible, it takes more to justify a more expensive project, than just: it will be faster.
My primary concern as a politician would be which solution can be affordable and adequate for the largest number of people who do not currently have something adequate.