Le 2012-08-02 10:24, Invisible a écrit :
> On 02/08/2012 02:49 PM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
>> Le 02/08/2012 12:23, Invisible a écrit :
>>
>>> Internet access is different though. You can't just suddenly say "ah,
>>> sod it, let's just increase the speed 500x". It requires completely
>>> replacing the entire infrastructure of the Internet - a presumably
>>> impossible task. So... is this really real?
>>
>> you only have to change the access part.
>> The Internet is already on fiber, excepted for the access part.
>
> Oh, well, sure. Apart from THE LARGEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE PART OF THE
> NETWORK, it's already fiber. No problem. :-)
>
>> Main issue: coverage is low. A study from March 2012 showed that only
>> 10% of home were connectable today, with 80% of them by the cable
>> operator: i.e. only 2% of the normal country is reachable so far with a
>> real fiber.
>
> The technology to access the Internet at gigabits per second already
> exists. The problem is that it will cost a fortune to dig up the entire
> country to lay hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber. Which is why
> nobody is doing this. (Or at least, not very fast.)


Nobody except everyone.  There were guys from the telephone company in 
my backyard a few weeks ago installing fibre optic cables on the 
telephost posts.  The tv cable has been fibre optics from the get go, 
when the neighborhood was built 6 years ago.

A few yearsa go, the carriers only installe dit when some cities would 
require "fibre to the home" for any new development, but now customers 
are asking for it, so they have no choice, or irsk losing those 
customers to the competition.

>
> This is what makes Google Fiber so surprising. They're not promising 3x
> more speed. They aren't offering 5x more. It even 10x more like BT
> Infinity just did to my house. (Did I mention my mother /works for/ BT?)
> They're talking about 200x more speed. That's epic, right there.
>

Yeah, moving from cat 3 copper wies to fibre optics will do that!

> It mirrors what happened with Gmail. Within weeks of Gmail going live,
> suddenly every other provider massively increased the storage they were
> offering. But that was because they had the capacity all along, they
> were just trying to charge lots of money for it. Today, any webmail
> service offering only 2MB of storage would be laughed out of the
> building. Google actually forced an entire market to change. Over night.
>
> Internet access is a little different. All Hotmail had to do was
> /literally/ press a button and everybody got a 500x storage limit
> increase. You can't do that with bandwidth.
>

Sure they can.  They've been offering HDTV signals over wire for the 
past 5 years, this means the infrastructure is there to support that 
bandwith.

The same thing happened 20 years ago when cable providers decided to 
become internet providers since they already had enough bandwidth to 
send 60 to 80 tv channels to every home... using one for data signals 
was not a problem at all.

This forced the phone companies to massively upgrade their networks to 
support faster and faster aDSL services.


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