mikiem2
Moderator
Broadband '2,000 times' faster aim of Bangor scientists
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-20183914
"Yes" say a team of UK researchers, who believe they are on the way to cracking how to cram more data down optic fibres - without breaking the bank.The scientists at Bangor University in north Wales have already managed to pump 20 gigabits of data every second - enough to download a full HD movie in 10 seconds.
They are now working on a three-year project to make it commercially viable.
Whiterabbit-uk
Games Guru
We had fibre optics laid by Cable & Wireless about 15 years ago, then C&W were bought out by NTL who have since been purchased by Virgin Media. They spent a couple of years or more laying it all over the cities and towns of the UK (apart from problem areas where they'd expect to get problems from residents (mainly council owned tower block residents) and rural areas where population densities didn't justify the cost.
The laying down of the cable was done almost automatically with a machine that dug a tiny trench into the pavements (only pavements with tarmac) and side roads then laid the cable with another machine infilling and then laying tarmac over the trench. It made a mess of our driveway, but generally the results were decent. You can still see the contrast between the old and new tarmac's. For some reason we ended up with two junctions instead of the usual one that most houses got. It only took them a few days to complete the whole of the private estate where I live.
I moved to fibre optic about 10 years ago when I decided to pay the extra for broadband as I'd started to play online games with friends. The old modem just didn't cut the silk with the 56KB speeds that were available back then. Its amazing how things have moved on with speeds of up to 100Mb available here in the UK. This new technology will change the face of internet access significantly.
mikiem2
Moderator
This is one area, that sort of infrastructure, where the US can really lag behind -- Fiber to the doorstep is really very, Very rare here.
Getting the "right of way" to run cable or fiber can be a nightmare, sometimes riddled with corruption, & since there's a cable run already there in most places [from the early 80s], no sense of urgency to overcome that sort of thing. Verizon tried running fiber to the neighborhood or block for their Fios service & gave up on the idea. For those close enough to a switching station there might be ADSL or DSL, which provides broadband over the regular twisted pair copper phone line, & ATT has their Uverse service in very few areas, where they provide TV over that same phone line broadband to compete with cable. In some places where you're talking about a very large metropolitan area, the total capacity isn't enough, so caps [limits on the amount of data that can be downloaded per month] might actually be needed rather than just a way for service providers to make more money, & most everywhere upload speeds are terribly, terribly slow because all the bandwidth has been allotted for traffic going in the other direction.
Right now the situation's workable IMHO only because a very large chunk of the population [including businesses] has no desire to go on-line. From time to time the gov talks about starting some sort of program to try & change that, often along with proposed programs to connect rural areas, but reality is they've never had the funds so it's been more along the lines of campaign promises by politicians that no one really believes. They have the revenue coming in -- phone & cable service comes with several taxes & government fees -- but the politician's use it to buy votes, e.g. providing free cell phones in a program where they make sure any requirements & restrictions aren't enforced. Last I read the federal gov was still sending money to what were *once* [in the 30s-40s] rural areas, like Las Vegas, to pay for stringing phone lines.
"I moved to fibre optic about 10 years ago when I decided to pay the extra for broadband as I'd started to play online games with friends. The old modem just didn't cut the silk with the 56KB speeds that were available back then."
We made the move to broadband so we could use the phone service we were paying for -- the only time the phone line wasn't in use was when the younger of our 2 boys was sleeping. It's alright now of course -- has been since about a year after we got broadband... that's when the mention of on-line gaming finally stopped provoking the somewhat pathological impulse to just cut the #@$!%&*!!! phone line. :) OTOH heard a modem warble on TV not too long ago while watching an old movie, & noticed my hand feeling for the wire cutters. :)
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