
The bandwidth bottleneck that is throttling the Internet - okket
http://www.nature.com/news/the-bandwidth-bottleneck-that-is-throttling-the-internet-1.20392
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excalibur
This seems like as good a place as any to complain that auctioning off radio
frequencies to the highest bidder is unlikely to result in optimal (or nearly
optimal) utilization of scarce resources, and is therefore working against the
public interest.

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runeks
I agree. I wonder if it would be sufficient to just allow companies to sue
each other in case of intentional interference, and otherwise just allow free
play. I suspect there is so much value in everyone cooperating that we would
more or less sort it out, without needing restrictions on who can operate at
which frequencies, by handing out frequency band monopolies to the three
highest paying bidders.

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elihu
That's basically how unlicensed wireless (e.g. 802.11 wireless ethernet)
works, and it seems to be working okay. I think increased unlicensed spectrum
would be great.

Another option would be to have something like a hybrid of the unlicensed and
HAM bands with more liberal output power restrictions than unlicensed spectrum
where you have to pass a test and get a proper (inexpensive) license to use
the band, but you can do more-or-less whatever you want within the band as
long as long as you identify your station, stay within output power limits,
and don't intentionally interfere with anyone.

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JStanton617
It does not work OK at all. Try being in any dense area such as an urban
apartment building. There are 30 networks I can see on all 11 wifi channels.
Its totally unusable.

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dTal
Is that an issue with unlicensed spectrum, or an issue with trying to provide
30 separate encrypted comms channels over a narrow bandwidth in a dense space?

Surely, increasing unlicensed spectrum would _alleviate_ this by providing for
more channels...

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Animats
I suspect that much of the demand for more bandwidth is really a demand for
lower latency. It's not that there's a real need for 1Gb/s to the user. It's
that the latency is too long under load. Some delay is being inserted by
middle boxes near the end user with dumb FIFO queuing. This is sometimes
called "bufferbloat", but it's not about how much RAM you have in the router,
it's about big FIFO queues.

Just prioritizing empty ACKs in the upstream direction can help a lot. If you
can't watch video while uploading a file, that's the problem.

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mwsherman
Good point. The utility of incremental bandwidth diminishes quickly.
[https://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-
perfor...](https://www.igvita.com/2012/07/19/latency-the-new-web-performance-
bottleneck/)

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Animats
Most bandwidth usage is ads and video. And bloated apps and web pages. What
else needs much bandwidth?

Even HDTV only needs about 20mb/s, and can be compressed down to 8mb/s or so
without much visible loss.

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badsock
Sending streaming lightfields for viewing in VR (for live sports etc.) Is
going to take every bit of bandwidth we can throw at it.

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hyperion2010
For a fun look at current fundamental limits on bandwidth I found this
wikipedia page [0]. Really puts things in perspective.

0\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates#Bandw...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates#Bandwidths)

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IAmGarrett
Google, FB, and Microsoft own cables. So I can see that it's data-intensive
companies. What does owning the cable do for them? They get to rent it out to
other companies?

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KaiserPro
Its a lot cheaper, and you can do fancy things at little to no extra cost.

For example, In the UK if you order a leased line for say 100megs, you'll get
some geenric fibre blown into the building. That fibre, and the equipment to
run it are all capable of at least 1gig, if not more. However you ISP will
charge you a lot more for the full line speed. Why? because they can, that and
upstream bandwidth costs more.

If you are interested in point to point, then getting semi decent dark fibre
allows you to do DWDM to get 40 gig per strand (most fibre cables are more
than on strand.)

a 32 fibre cable (Most of the cost is the physical laying, not the fibre it's
self) would give you 1.2tbps theoretical. All for the cost of installing one
cable.

Also owning your own cables means you can peer directly with other networks
without having to go through a third party. (In the EU, and rest of the world
at least, The US have some horrid monopoly system.) This means that the cost
of buying bandwidth drops dramatically.

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virtuallynathan
DWDM on commercial equipment is up to >24Tbps per fiber, long haul is about
8-12Tbps (trans-oceanic). I haven't looked into the details yet, but earlier
this year Nokia announced a system that can do 70Tbps per fiber.

New Sub-sea builds are usually 6 fibers, some large-scale terrestrial builds
are up to almost 8000 fibers (euNetworks did this across europe).

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dzdt
Why not more fibers sub-sea? I would have guessed when you are going to the
expense to lay fiber across an ocean, including a fair amount of dark fiber
looks like a good investment.

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kornholi
Repeaters and equalizers. They go up to 8 fiber pairs, and are probably the
most expensive single component for long cables. You need separate
amplifiers/equalizers for each single fiber, so the cost strongly depends on
the number of strands.

Since these repeaters are typically placed every 50-80km, there's a
significant number of them in long systems and powering them becomes a
challenge. These cables usually operate around 10kV DC at 1-2 amps, and I'm
not sure how realistic it would be to go higher. The wire resistance losses
are probably already more than 70% of the voltage budget, so you can't really
use more current (voltage drop = I^2 R). Higher voltages cause other issues
such as dielectric breakdown. Deep ocean cables are actually pretty thin,
about as thick as a garden hose, and I doubt you could easily pass more than
15kV. You also have to account for ground voltage shift between the continents
which may be as high as 1kV and depends on the weather.

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jwatte
Given the headline, I thought it was going to say "Comcast."

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ldehaan
the size of your pipe is not the speed of your pipe. something I think few
people understand.

better compression and less chatty protocols would certainly help with this
issue but the overall solution is using superconductors instead of plain
wires.

I raise my glass in salute to the day we all have hydrogen superconductors as
our pop.

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di
> the Internet is still a global patchwork built on top of a century-old
> telephone system.

No, it's not.

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snw
it is in germany.

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runeks
And Denmark.

Of course, the core internet nodes are not connected by old phone lines, but
most of the edge nodes (consumers) are.

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Symbiote
Most edge nodes in Denmark (6.6 million) are mobile phones, 2.4M are fixed
lines.

Worldwide, DSL is less than half of all fixed lines. Denmark has decent fibre
networks, and cable TV, but i haven't found any numbers for usage.

Statistics from
[http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/oecdbroadbandportal.htm](http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/oecdbroadbandportal.htm)

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joeblau
First thing I did was open the page and try to find the word "Comcast".

