Oh you’re going to make the geek girl work here aren’t you? lmao!

Well — as for Cuban, I think our society tends to defer to people who’ve reached a measure of success (meaning money) and we often give weight to their opinions because we think they must know something that we don’t even tho it’s probably just luck.

Yes — I know FIOS is fiber. And it isn’t so much that being 3rd in the world for broadband penetration is a bad thing, but looking forward, if we’re to remain competitive for the future, we have to make the investment now in infrastructure, as well as making green investments and creating these green jobs and tech jobs.

You make great points about latency and the issues with satellites for real time applications. You just can’t get around the physics. But I still believe fiber is the best option and I’m not so convinced that it’s all that difficult to maintain if it’s deployed correctly.

Do you know what the biggest obstacle to deployment is? And Verizon is bumping into this with FIOS — it’s the local governments and municipalities wanting kickbacks from the telecom companies to allow them to wire their towns with fiber. So, you’ve got some local town selectman or town manager wanting to basically extort payments from the telcos just to let the service in. That’s why I feel this needs to be mandated on a federal level and get everyone’s hands out of the cookie jar.

The other issue is signal. While much of the data travels on the intertubes over the backbone in a digital form, usually thru fiber — the signal at some point needs to be converted, either thru some type of demod/modulator to convert it between analog and digital. This leads to signal loss — even +/- 7dB is noticeable.

If we had a true fiber infrastructure and transmitted and received signals in a pure point to point digital form, this would free up a lot of bandwidth and give us fabulous speed and quality of service. And I truly think this is essential for our future.

The copper wire system we have in place in most neighborhoods is falling apart — and it isn’t just network infrastructure which needs work. This country is truly falling apart. With what we’re spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — we could do all of this and it would put a lot of people to work and we’d be able to address the serious issues of climate change as well if we do it correctly.

But as I said — such grand scale and big thinking projects are hard for people to grasp. They’d rather be pandered to by that idiot Hillary Clinton with her ridiculous gas tax holiday that’s going to save a grand total of 28 bucks per household and relies on a tax penalty against the oil companies which doesn’t even exist. She’s a moron who will say anything to get elected, even if she rips the Democratic party apart in the process. I’ve never felt such a visceral reaction to any one politician in my life — I can even tolerate Bush’s lies and bullshit more than hers at this point, and that’s saying a lot.

We need to think different and we need to think bigger.

nina

Onto the meat of the subject:

FIOS is fiber. Whether it’s a bandaid or not, it’s still fiber. I honestly do not know if it’s fiber from your house to the CO, then copper from there to the main trunk, but I’d doubt it. The infrastructure SHOULD be ready for fiber all the way to the curb. But you STILL have copper between that box on the outside of your house and your router. If they bring the fiber to the wireless router, you are then constrained by how much juice you put into the router (i.e. get a Gigabit router, you’ll get gigabit to the Intertubes…maybe).

Gigabit ethernet access via satellite has one BIG problem: latency. The speed of light is finite (and in fact for the purposes of this discussion never-changing). A radio signal going from my house to the satellite then back down to your house is MUCH slower than the same signal travelling on fiber. Both are going at 186,000 miles per second, but the distance is different. A geosynchronous orbit (which is what that satellite has to be in) is approximately 26000 miles. That is further out than the entire circumference of the earth at the equator. And it has to round trip, so really that’s 52000 miles.

My point is, that’s not the best solution for everyone. There are applications ranging from gaming to real time remote monitoring of nuclear power plants that rely on low latency connections.

Fiber is a good solution…if it’s implemented correctly. But it’s not a great solution. And it’s costly to maintain. Wireless access points planted every 100 feet is a good solution, if etc…but it’s not great (arguably, worse than fiber to the curb). I like what Verizon’s doing with their broadband modems that hook up to the Verizon network…but at $50/month, that’s no bargain, especially for those less able to afford it (like, most of the middle class, after Bush gets done). And, again, it’s no great solution, considering how crappy most cell phones are these days.

I don’t have a great solution to the network infrastructure issue. I don’t see that we’re 3rd out of 180 countries being a big problem. At least we have the capability.

As far as Net Neutrality, you and I are on the same page, that access providers should not place themselves in the way of content providers. I’ve never run into a problem with that, however. And I’m on Comcast. Then again, I don’t really spend time on the intertubes trying to do things with Comcast’s competitors. I play XBox, I surf the web.

Mmmm. Yes. It would be nice if everyone in the world could know freedom.

nina