Future of Broadband?

I do not have a link or anything of that sort, but I was forced to spend about 3 hours today with a phone repairman while he was fixing our T1 at work.

Long story short. He was talking about how Bellsouth (a major phone company for non southern usa people) was beginning to install fiber right up to homes in and about the atlanta area. Evidently this is not a business type deal, but more of an experiment to see how well it works for normal consumers.

Assuming this is true it seems to me that there would be quite a bit more bandwith so far as data goes. Has anyone in or around Atlanta Georgia heard anything about this?

As I understand it, eventually (long term) they want to bring fibre right up to the consumer in all cities, maybe not to individual homes, but certainly to neighbourhoods and such.  My only fear is that with hugely increased bandwidth, we\'ll also see hugely irritating websites/movies/animations popping up everywhere.  Even now, many sites just aren\'t 56k friendly, and god help you if you accidentally open the wrong pdf file on some of these sites.

I just found a link confirming it.
http://www.lucent.com/press/0699/990603.cob.html

The way he talked there was some issue with copper prices increasing too much, and Bellsouth\'s reasoning is that it would be more cost effective in the long run to change over to fiber. I did not realize fiber prices had dropped so much.

I agree on the 56k issue. I up until about a month ago was stuck at that speed, and I found I used the net for e-mail, and 3 websites. There was too much flash, and other bigger pages out there. It took all the fun away for me.

one word....cost

who\'s gonna pay for millions of miles of fibre?

Originally posted by mm
one word....cost

who\'s gonna pay for millions of miles of fibre?

We wil in our phone bill. Truth be known if you read the article they are wanting to become your one source for everything. Not to mention in larger towns they have an incredible amount of copper out there which is prone to fail. Evidence my 3rd time babysitting a phone guy in a month because of wiring from the main office out to our work. It is evidently old, and is need of being replaced.

He also mentioned how one fiber line could replace like 60\'000 copper wires

Infrastructure these days is crazy expensive, but the big companies like AT&T build these networks, and then recover the money by supplying all the smaller subsidieries who use their network.  Bell in Canada, for instance, built much of the infrastructure, and recovered their costs years ago.  I would imagine that with copper being so costly, they could recycle all that old wire and recover a lot of cost with installing fibre.

well if fibre optic connections become readily available, would\'nt that mean less bandwidth to go around? (i mean slower download speeds, just imagine everyone in yer neighbourhood having something like cable and all using it at the same time [peak hours] :eek:])

Originally posted by Tyrant
well if fibre optic connections become readily available, would\'nt that mean less bandwidth to go around? (i mean slower download speeds, just imagine everyone in yer neighbourhood having something like cable and all using it at the same time [peak hours] :eek:])

It is running somthing called idsl from what I understand. A close cousin to DSL. SO I would assume so long as their main line is not overloaded you would be ok.

If what they say is right, and a 100 meg connection is possible. I can only imagine how much pron I ... uhm a person could download a night.

Something needs to be done already.  Cable and DSL simply sucks imo.  Everyone is just content with them as they are much faster than ancient dial-up connections.  When I was working for the Navy in their DC research center I saw what a real net connection was like, not sure what kind of backbone they were running but it made my cable connection seem like 28.8k in comparison.

fibre is decades away for 90% of the world

[videoholic]

Yeah, but we\'re american.  We don\'t care about 90% of the world.  

[MPTheory]

I bet more people will start to go wireless first...

[Living-In-Clip]

*cries*

I\'d settle for DSL / Cable.

Canada\'s just a year or two behind the US, in most of these types of tech infrastructure upgrading.  HDTV, Broadband, it all comes here pretty quick.... especially to the cities