>>>> 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!
>>
>> Well, you say that... My employer has a dedicated fiber connection, and
>> it has a maximum speed of 10 mbit/sec. (We actually pay for 5mbit/sec.
>> Costs about £30,000/year, IIRC. Then again, that's because we get
>> business-grade reliability guarantees...)
>
> That's because of the protocol overhead, and type of fibre, and also
> probably the fact that you share a fiber strand with other customers
> further down the road. Fibre optics can go up to 10 Gbps for each 20nm
> of wavelength. So, with the proper hardware, which is far from cheap,
> you can have multiple 10 Gbps pipes going down one fibre strand. We've
> been through that before.

Apparently it depends on whether it's single-mode fiber or multi-mode 
fiber or whatever. Much like there are different grades of copper wire, 
there are presumably different grades of fiber. The one laid to our 
building can only handle 10mbit/sec max. If we want more, we have to pay 
for them to run another fiber. (Although apparently the next one up tops 
out at 100mbit/sec. I shudder to think what that costs...)

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