Is Fiber Worth It?

[IdeaStormer]

One less person on my fiber the better! Yea go ADSL!

 

[solomongrundy]

why is there a big buzz for fiber when ADSL and ADSL+ are great

Broccoli has fiber.

[applebook]

Broccoli has fiber.

 

A lot of it!

 

Do you people know why Elvis died so young? He lacked fibre to wash down all of that Memphis BBQ meat that was lodged in his intestines. 

Seriously, people, you need 20-30 grams of fibre a day --depending on how much meat, fat, sugar, and overall calories you consume. 

[Torey]

I started with Dial-UP, then went to Cable, Does DSL have better pings then cable internet? Just curious.

[Guest Kefuren]

I started with Dial-UP, then went to Cable, Does DSL have better pings then cable internet? Just curious.

 

It depends, I wouldn't say anything universal for it. For me, cable has WAY lower pings than what I had with DSL (basically going from 40ms (DSL) to 7ms (cable) from here to the capital). But for me the fibre is also like ~200m away from where I live so that might have a big effect on it too.

[LAwLz]

Here are a list of benefits I can think of (some are for the ISPs and some are for the end users):

• Much much higher bandwidth - The best ADSL currently available (ADSL2+M) can give you about 24Mbps down and 3.3Mbps up. Most fiber connections I've seen can handle gigabits and it's very common that people with fiber connections has 100 Mbps up and 10 Mbps down (and it's not uncommon that people with such high speed connections gets even higher speeds).
   
• Lower latency - Contrary to popular belief, this is not because "fiber uses light which is super fast" (electricity almost travels at the speed of light) but because ADSL lines has quite a lot of noise and therefore there are things like extra ECC which needs to be implemented. These add extra latency. This is pretty much only based on anecdotal evidence but with ADSL it's not uncommon to have ~50ms to a server decently far away. With a fiber connection it's pretty rare to have over 10 ms (again, totally anecdotal and it depends on a lot of stuff).
   
• Reliability - With ADSL things like thunderstorms can cause interference and dramatically reduce the total bandwidth available on that line. Since fiber uses light it is not vulnerable to that kind of interference. The fact that the signal doesn't degrade over short distances also means that you will pretty much always get the speed you pay for, and quite often you get even higher speeds than you pay for with fiber. With DSL the speed you get depends on how far away from the closest amplifier you are, which is why you see stuff like "up to 24Mbps, and at least 12Mbps". That's because they can't ensure that DSL station is close enough to actually deliver 24Mbps.
   
• Cheaper to manufacture the cables - Copper is really expensive, and fiber cables are made out of plastic and glass (they don't necessarily need to have glass in them though, they can use a special type of plastic as well). Copper increases in price all the time, so this will become more and more important in the future. Fiber cables don't corrode either, so they require less maintenance.
   
• Range - DSL has pretty shitty range and need amplifiers which consumes power. For an ISP, this can add up to quite a lot if it has lots of amplifiers. Fiber has an extremely long range and don't need these amplifiers, making it cheaper to run.
   
• Future proof - This is mostly speculation on my side, but I don't see any problem reusing fiber cables even when new technologies appears. With DSL we are kind of reaching the limit of what we can cram out of them. With fiber optics there is a great potential to for example improve the sensors and allow for more colors of light to be used, and thus increase the bandwidth greatly. I don't really see any issue with reusing the same cables, and just change the laser and sensor to use more colors. Oh and that's without mentioning the fact that fiber is already much much faster than DSL.

 

Basically, fiber is better in every single way except availability. Digging down cables is extremely expensive (seriously, it is far more than you could possibly imagine) and companies usually want to get as much as possible out such big investments. If you spent a billion dollars digging down cables, then you wouldn't want to replace all of them just 20 years later if they were still "good enough".

[R4STABAN]

Adsl is not 'good' anymore. It's slow.

[jscho]

Because copper is shit. For internet in Australia

Bottom line.

We have a 100 year old copper network in Australia, and I get 7-8Mbps on a good day, and our government is refusing to implement a proper FTTP connection. Our old government was doing it before they got voted out.

[Darren]

Basically, fiber is better in every single way except availability. Digging down cables is extremely expensive (seriously, it is far more than you could possibly imagine) and companies usually want to get as much as possible out such big investments. If you spent a billion dollars digging down cables, then you wouldn't want to replace all of them just 20 years later if they were still "good enough".

 

Definitely. Fiber based telecommunication services for end users is definitely where it's going. It's so scalable and depends on the equipment at each end more than the cable itself which is great for the actual owners of the infrastructure. Mind you, they would have had the same thoughts when they were rolling out ADSL...