Fiber - super fast broadband :-D

Soldato
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29 Sep 2005
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7202396.stm


We are talking here about fibre speed; not that dreaded word broadband.

The UK's first "fibre town" could go online in the autumn, delivering speeds of about 100Mbps (megabits per second) to consumers' homes.....

:D Can't wait, fed up of slow speeds and caps on services in my area. I can't wait till I am streaming high def content on demand and downloading demo's in seconds!
 
Just read that and came over here to see what people had to say about it.

Apparently not a lot :p

It's not download speed that bothers me. Its the total lack of upload speed. Remote CCTV, w
ebcam, file sharing etc is all slow as [dog poo] and it seems really silly in this day and age ya know?

Ta

Alec
 
Am I the only one that just does not see the point when so many ISP's have Download Limits, Throttling etc. I can just see it now 100MB/s with a 5GB/Month limit. Pointless.
 
Very much doubt you'd get a limit on fibre. It will come in the form of traffic shapping to keep everything running. But not a download cap.
 
Very much doubt you'd get a limit on fibre. It will come in the form of traffic shapping to keep everything running. But not a download cap.

I reckon you would, even if the UK was wired with fibre for free tomorrow the ISPs infrastructure doesn't exist to support that kind of backbone traffic...so they'd have to limit it.

Thing is, nobody needs 100mb, I mean noboby really need thats kind of bandwidth. I can stream live video from a hosted box to my laptop at home over ADSL max and it's impossible to tell from a DVD playing on the machine quality wise. Unless you're downloading loads of stuff (which, 95% of the time, is going to be of dubious legality) you simply don't need that kind of bandwidth.

Lower latency more reliable connections should be the end game, not increased bandwidth.
 
I reckon you would, even if the UK was wired with fibre for free tomorrow the ISPs infrastructure doesn't exist to support that kind of backbone traffic...so they'd have to limit it.

Thing is, nobody needs 100mb, I mean noboby really need thats kind of bandwidth. I can stream live video from a hosted box to my laptop at home over ADSL max and it's impossible to tell from a DVD playing on the machine quality wise. Unless you're downloading loads of stuff (which, 95% of the time, is going to be of dubious legality) you simply don't need that kind of bandwidth.

Lower latency more reliable connections should be the end game, not increased bandwidth.

Why would they cap it at xxgb when at peak time the bandwidth is gonna get trashed anyway? Look at virgin media for example. It makes more sense to just traffic shape.

Besides they like plastering the word "unlimited" over all their BB packages and im sure any new ISP would too also.

Maybe I'll be proved wrong but i VERY much doubt they will cap connections. Would put a hundred quid on it.
 
I've been learning about fibre recently as its going to be a big part of my job for the future.

Apparently in america they have been transfering speeds of up to 40gbps over a distance of a few meters!
 
Why would they cap it at xxgb when at peak time the bandwidth is gonna get trashed anyway? Look at virgin media for example. It makes more sense to just traffic shape.

Besides they like plastering the word "unlimited" over all their BB packages and im sure any new ISP would too also.

Maybe I'll be proved wrong but i VERY much doubt they will cap connections. Would put a hundred quid on it.

Because capping stops misuse more effectively than shaping. If you shape the connection whats the point in having 100mb? You'll never use that bandwidth for HTTP or normal uses. You won't even use it for streaming.

It's fairer for normal users to have an unshaped connection and a high cap, if you cap at 100GB or similar then the big downloaders run out early in the month (or even better never sign up) and ordinary users (95% of the population can use the connection however they fancy and burst up to 100mbps.

Also, shaping means you could download a hell of a lot if you left your connection on at 2mbps 24/7. Capping prevents that and because ISPs pay huge amounts of money for transit and peering that's going to matter to them. Capping means you know the maximum a customer will cost you in transit bandwidth in a month, shaping only gives you an idea.

I'd cap connections, just my opinion and they may well do it differently but it makes most sense and protects normal users best if they do. It depends on the ISP in the end.

TBH I wish the ASA would get on with and stamp on the 'unlimited' claims because they're not true.
 
I am going to have to wait years! Being right down on the south east coast. Whitstable...near to Dover (ish).

I think it would be easy to put the fibre cabling on the same poles that bring our phone line in, this would save men scrubbing about in the **** of the sewers...unless there are sever implications with that.
 
I've been learning about fibre recently as its going to be a big part of my job for the future.

Apparently in america they have been transfering speeds of up to 40gbps over a distance of a few meters!

Not particularly impressive to be honest. Can be achieved with current technology if you want.

Our London core is 10Gbit fibre, we have the option of running DWDM on the fibre spans (which we own) and as such running multiple 10Gbit links on different wavelengths on the same fibre. We could easily go up to 40Gbit using that if we needed the bandwidth tomorrow.

Personally I reckon 40Gbit will die as a standard and it'll jump all the way to 100Gbit in a few years.
 
Not particularly impressive to be honest. Can be achieved with current technology if you want.

Our London core is 10Gbit fibre, we have the option of running DWDM on the fibre spans (which we own) and as such running multiple 10Gbit links on different wavelengths on the same fibre. We could easily go up to 40Gbit using that if we needed the bandwidth tomorrow.

Personally I reckon 40Gbit will die as a standard and it'll jump all the way to 100Gbit in a few years.

Lets hope so!
 
In all honesty, I don't have a clue. A couple of friends in the states are on 50Mb connections and they regard that as "slow". One of them has a 250Mb connection at home.

But it goes to show anyways, if they have said problem over there, we have too!. I couldn't even guess how many customers are loaded onto any given UBR and how much contention there is at that point :|
 
In all honesty, I don't have a clue. A couple of friends in the states are on 50Mb connections and they regard that as "slow". One of them has a 250Mb connection at home.

But it goes to show anyways, if they have said problem over there, we have too!. I couldn't even guess how many customers are loaded onto any given UBR and how much contention there is at that point :|

Really? I would go back and check with them, as i understand it FIOS is the US's first fiber optic broadband and that runs at 15Mb
 
I can stream live video from a hosted box to my laptop at home over ADSL max and it's impossible to tell from a DVD playing on the machine quality wise.

Of course that's all well and good if you've got a decent connection. However, a large part of the country is still suck at relatively low speeds (I'm on a max profile of 1mbit). I'd welcome fibre if it could guarantee a decent speed for all (say 10mbit), not 100mbit for a lucky select few.
 
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