Talk about getting screwed at high speed

[RawAlex]

The other part of this that is really funny is that there are thousands of miles of dark fiber out there going city to city and point to point because too much was built in the wrong places. In the mean time, little has been done for the "last mile", and as a result, all the speed in the network never makes it to the end users.

My DSL here they claim 3, I get 4 without a blink. Cable company is suggesting up to 10mps, but I suspect that only applies when nobody else is on your loop (cable modems are, for the most part, token ring networks... the more people you put on them, the less bandwidth available to you). They continue to improve speeds by shrinking the number of users per segment by splitting segments into smaller and smaller pieces. My old cable modem was great until 4 in the afternoon, the kids would come home from school, turn on Napster, and the entire network would sink down to less than dialup. Too funny!

My house is 4 years old. Copper inside, but I know it's fiber up to the switch point, about 1000 feet from here. They have a head end for the DSL in that little hut.

Alex

[cd34]

Originally Posted by RawAlex

The other part of this that is really funny is that there are thousands of miles of dark fiber out there going city to city and point to point because too much was built in the wrong places.

In Florida, dark fiber must be tagged and is assigned property tax. The entire path is mapped including termination points, and is labelled.

When a telecom company stops paying property tax, that fiber becomes property of the state. Since it is documented, it can be resold to cover the taxable cost. We also have a state tax based on the number of ethernet ports on our networks.

The reason there is so much dark fiber out there is two-fold:

Fiber was the End All Be All to our data woes. Unlimited bandwidth, every investor jumped in, every company ran fiber that could get right-of-ways at a cost of about $10k/mile. Everyone built their networks, but, the clients never came.

Because there was so much dark fiber laid and not used, companies went out of business. since termination and route maps were not maintained, much of the fiber in the ground is destined to stay dark forever. Even companies that installed their own fiber have lost route maps and relay cable all the time because they don't have a firm grasp on what they already have.