Comments on: Buying a Home Based on Fiber Availability? Yes, Say Consumers

By: Uncle Ken

Uncle Ken — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:09:00 +0000

To each their own Personally I do not see the need to stay connect to the internet every minute of the day nor do I see the need to tweet what im doing every minute of the day. Speed sometimes a nice thing but if it takes and hour or a half hour the data will still get there. There is just no one that needs a 10 second download or upload. Those people will be driving themselves crazy in the end. I even ditched my cell phone. I did not need it. I could just picture me spending $2000 a year for an Iphone to stay connected just to be cool, for people calling me up because then need money… Family knows where I am and how to find me Different story. If you go away for a weekend you want to escape all that chatter or you would not go away in the first place. I can see a new wife / kids book “How I spent my vacation” with Mr. wonderful spending all his
Time on a connection device. Advice to the wife go alone bring the kids they will love the pool and you may get lucky. 

By: BrionS

BrionS — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:55:22 +0000

Ah, but they don’t sell that bandwidth to 2280 customers. The current model (at least if you’re a cable company) is more like take the bandwidth of that channel and use 50% of it for video services. The remaining half is divvied up to 10,000 customers subscribed at various rates including 50 Mbps. Then when people aren’t watching TV but they’re all using the Internet you have congestion and slowdowns.

Overselling bandwidth is probably still common practice even with FTTH from the central office (CO) to the backbone. The only fiber that isn’t oversold is the line to your house from the CO. Overselling is not a problem unless the factor by which you do it is unsustainable. It’s highly unlikely for everyone to be online at once saturating their connections (unless, perhaps there’s some national event taking place and it’s being simulcast using streaming video on the web).

As to the article itself, I don’t think I’d go to so far as to say I won’t consider buying a home if FTTH was unavailable, but I would certainly be hesitant if I knew there was no competition for high speed Internet in the area in which I was looking (unless of course I don’t have a choice to move).

Lastly it seems something of a sad commentary on our lives to day if high speed Internet is “more important than other amenities such as green space/walking trails, 24 hour neighborhood patrol, a community pool, and a fitness center/club house.” Although these amenities sound like rental property amenities and not single family homes (except for townhouses / condos).

Still, as much as I need the Internet for my daily routine (bill payment and money management in particular) I’m loathe to give up green spaces just to have high speed access.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:54:51 +0000

When we get our next house, it will be FTTH already. If that means building a house with fiber installed instead of a twisted pair or coaxial, then so be it. Fiber is the future and is so much faster than anything copper can sustain. I have AT&T Uverse right now and they can only do 25Mb total, telephone, internet, and IPTV, over their fiber-copper hybrid system. Eventually, they will have to drop that model and start bringing it to the home. I read, in certain new housing developments, AT&T does install FTTH on those new homes.

Also, AT&T, NEC, and Corning have improved on fiber speeds by getting 114Gigabits/second, over EACH of the 320 optical channels, with a new method of transmission. Also, this new method also allows almost twice the distance.

http://news.soft32.com/att-nec-corning-complete-record-breaking-fiber-capacity-test_7372.html

So there is room for growth in fiber. I was just thinking, these ISP’s, with one channel of this fiber, could fit 2280 customers at 50Mb download speed. Does that sound like a “bandwidth” crisis to you? And most people won’t even subscribe to the premium 50Mb connection.