They’re doing the whole California rail thing again and a big part of Americans is cheering for it. You wanted a greater America? Enjoy the privatization of everything :)
Pros of fibre:
- cheaper: much cheaper than copper or satellites.
- faster: latency is faster than copper and wireless (to satellite).
- very high bandwidth: theoretically unlimited. In practice a commercial fibre optic multicore run for domestic use at street/town level will be pushing ~800Gb/a, and this number generally doubles every few years as tech advances. The new spec being finalised is 1.6Pb/s.
- high stability: does not give a crap if it’s cloudy, foggy, or rainy, or if the trees have wet leaves, or if it’s just a very humid day, unlike all forms of outdoor wireless comms. Does not care about lightning strikes, as copper does.
- long life: 25 to 30 years life quoted for most industrial in-ground fibre, but real life span is expected to be much longer based on health checks on deployed cable in countries with large fibre rollouts. Upgradable without replacing the medium throughout that lifecycle.
- lowest power usage: fibre optic uses far less power and energy than 4G 5G and satellite infrastructure.
Cons of nationwide fibre:
- billionaires who launched thousands of satellites make less money.
- monopoly Internet Service Providers won’t be able to fleece their cable internet customers some of the highest charges for net access in the world.
- people will tell you “uhm acktually wireless internet is the speed of light also as it communicates via photons”, but will usually leave out all of the interference it experiences.
There’s nothing better than fibre optic infrastructure for general public Internet connectivity. Wireless/satellite should only be a last resort for remote users.
As someone who wrote their CS thesis on networks I find starlink infuriating. Its such a terrible option that basically persists through memes and highly niche use anecdotes.
You can literally cover entire landmass of earth with fiber and cell towers for pennies on a dollar what low orbit satellites would get you.
Not to mention is objectively better technology which we would have to setup anyways if we want low latency networks and why wouldn’t we want that in the future? There are countless benefits to reduced latency so it’s really unavoidable. Now some want to prioritize worse technology when it’s at peak cost. It’s so fucking stupid.
Shouldn’t the 5G covid brain control serum chip nanobot people be upset about this?
Inb4 “The satellites are beaming mind control into your head”
there’s nothing better than optic fiber because nothing can be faster than light
Edit: as comment below says optic fiber isn’t actually faster, but still better because it has lower packet loss, is cheaper and not owned by elon musk
This has got a scary amount of up votes, especially considering that this is the ‘technology’ community.
Radiowaves are also ‘light’ and infact as many others have mentioned so eloquently, light travelling through air is faster than light travelling through glass. The reasons why fiber is better are - better stability because of lower packet loss and interference, better efficiency because of lower attenuation and losses due to diffusion, reflection, and other processes when traveling in a fiber optic cable, and more bandwidth because we can use more favourable frequencies in optic cables (@qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website explains it perfectly in another reply to the parent comment)
scary amount of up votes
Eh, I think it’s fine. Fiber is faster (higher bandwidth, lower latency) than light transmission due to the factors you mentioned, so whether it technically transmits slower than light is largely irrelevant.
The speed of light through a medium is what varies, since I have to deal with this at work, and the speed of light through air is technically faster than the speed of light through fiber. But now there is hollow core fiber that makes this difference less.
Between Chicago and New York the latency of the specialized wireless links commercially available is around about 1/2 of standard fiber taking the most direct route. But bandwidth is also only in gigabits/s vs terabits/s you can put over typical fiber backbone.
But both are faster than humans can perceive anyway.
Yes, but transmission loss causes packet retransmission, which adds to perceived latency, and fiber usually doesn’t need to travel as far physically as a satellite, so there’s less distance to cover.
So yes, the “speed” of light through fiber is technically slower than via air, the data transfer is usually faster.
Transmission loss/attenuation only informs the power needed on the transmission side for the receiver to be able to receive the signal. The wireless networks I am talking about don’t really have packet loss (aside from when the link goes down for reasons like hardware failure).
I mention Chicago to New York specifically because in the financial trading world, we use both wireless network paths and fiber paths between the locations and measured/real latency is a very big deal and measured to the nanoseconds.
So what I mention has nothing to do with human perception as fiber and wireless are both faster than most human’s perceptions. We also don’t have packet loss on either network path.
High speed/ high frequency Wireless is bound by the curvature of the earth and terrain for repeater locations. Even with all of the repeaters, measured latency for these commercially available wireless links are 1/2 the latency of the most direct commercially available fiber path between Chicago and New York.
Fiber has in-line passive amplifiers, which are a fun thing to read about how they work, so transmission loss/attenuation only applies to where the passive amplifiers are.
You are conflating latency (how long it takes bits to go between locations) with bandwidth (how many bits can be sent per second between locations) in your last line.
You are conflating latency… with bandwidth
That’s why I put “speed” in quotes. When lay people say “speed,” they mean a mix of latency and bandwidth, and lay people are the target for a discussion comparing Starlink and fiber internet.
Point to point wireless can be incredibly “fast” and reliable, at least until a storm interferes or knocks something out of alignment. We used point to point wireless at a previous company for our internet needs, and it worked really well, and I’m guessing more industrial installations are even better.
But your average person will have a much better experience with fiber to the home than fixed wireless. That’s the point I think the OP is making.
Again the latency might be not better for fiber. But the difference is small and the other factors are much better so the experience with fiber is a lot more stable .
I do not expect most people to know that non visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum is also similar to visible light. But on technology community on what is a niche enthusiast heavy platform (Lemmy), I expect people to know better to than to upvote something that is blatantly wrong.
It’s not blatantly wrong, it’s technically wrong but close enough. Fiber is faster than satellite because it uses fiber, not because it uses light. There are a lot of less technical people here, so I think it’s close enough.
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That’s…not really a cogent argument.
Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).
Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they’re just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don’t call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.
If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don’t use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/
Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about fractional bandwidth (“delta frequency divided by frequency”), whereas “information bandwidth” cares about absolute bandwidth (“delta frequency”), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz — so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.
Microwave point-to-point radios are fastest because they travel through air, but more importantly, are typically the shortest path possible by line-of-sight.
Being 66.7% of speed of light doesn’t matter terribly when you consider that the cable path is shorter by more than 66.7% of path taken by satelite link.
Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum
I’m a complete laymen when it comes to this, but this sounds like it would pertain to latency rather than bandwidth. I expect that fiber would have a much higher data capacity than satellite.
Yep, you’re right — I was just responding to parent’s comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)
Light in glass is actually surprisingly slow
After some distance, starlink would have better latency, as while the signal needs to go through a bunch of km of slow atmosphere, it would make up for that by having a big part of the signal go through vacuum between satellites
But latency isn’t everything
Fiber (when properly installed) is very stable. Satellite and mobile is always at least a little bit flaky
St*rlink orbits at 500 km so you would need to be like 1800 km by land away from your destination to have a better latency. At that point your latency will be terrible anyway
Hard to calculate exactly.
Latency is lower through the atmosphere than in glass (I thought that air was worse, but turns out it’s not. Makes sense. Glass is solid after all)
So it could be even closer than that. But there’s also the problem of the SL base station having to do the last bit of the route through fiber to the destination again. Do it also depends on where the base station is located in regards to the destination
Starlink can be more direct as well. The further fiber goes the less direct it is. By the time we’re talking between continents that builds up a lot.
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I’ve heard starlink is faster than fiber by a few nanoseconds and big finance really wants that for their high-speed trading
most of its signals move though space, compared to the glass in fiber so it sorta makes sense
Line of site is a thing…
It depends on the distance, but yes. Those laser interlinks are fast.
Its not, light is the fastest AND isnt as interuptuble and lag induced as satalite. A wired connection will ALWAYS have lesslatency to a sat link.
The problem with fiber is it isn’t direct, and the satellites do use lasers (light!) to travel longer distances. The longer the distance the bigger edge satellite internet gets.
light in a vacuum is fastest
light in glass is slower than that
actually think about this before you reply
Better get to work laying cable.
Wireless data transmission should only ever be used for nomadic, temporary, and/or sacrificial links.
They’re useful for quick deployment, but are intrinsically brittle and terrible for resiliency and efficiency.
The longer the dependence on them for a given use case, the less defensible arguments in support of them become.
I’m all for the use of satellite delivery of internet services, but only when it’s used in conjunction with a broader roll out of hardwired infrastructure, at which point it can reasonably be relegated to serving as a secondary, backup diverse path.
Someone really needs to explain the fundamental limitations of shared medium internet connections (pretty much anything wireless) when compared to exclusive medium internet connections (one wire/fiber per end point) to politicians and other decision makers. Banning the advertising of shared medium speeds as if they were exclusively reserved for you would be a good start.
Oh, I see.
You think this is a “politicians don’t understand the tech they’re supposed to regulate” issue, and not a “Elon Musk is bribing every greedy asshole in Congress to prop up his businesses at taxpayer expense” issue.
I think one of the issues with taking bribes is that even corrupt people don’t want to completely ruin the economy because you don’t want the people trying to bribe you lack the money to do so. Or in other words, even apart from any moral issues you don’t want to kill your golden goose.
They can ruin the economy all they want. The people who are bribing them aren’t going to run out of money.
Maybe not the top 5 out of those people but the rest certainly will.
They won’t. Not even the top 100. Politicians are relatively cheap to buy.
What does it matter, the rest didn’t bribe them anyway…
you underestimate how shortsighted republicans are
Counterpoint: the fact that the moral “don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs” even exists is proof that people are indeed greedy and/or stupid enough to do that very thing.
Uhhh – the politicians politicized money to companies to make tubes that we never got. Not sure if elaborating on details of tubes is going to help clear things up.
They were never building that, let’s be honest.
Edit: rural broadband is like the new affordable housing, high speed rail, or better public transit… It’s something that’s completely possible to do but they’ll always find some excuse to do nothing so they can campaign on it again next cycle
It was basically up to the states this time around, they could allocate BEAD funds more or less as they wanted and absolutely build fiber out to the vast majority of residences (look at North Dakota, it’s evidently possible) through models like municipal fiber.
Ultimately it’s a political issue more than anything else, Americans just can’t get anything done anymore, politicians would rather enrich themselves and voters only care about the culture war.
I wish there was more municipal fiber. It’s absolutely insane that the big ISPs fight it and often win.
In capitalist America, laws decide you!
This is proof of why Direct Democracy is better than “Representative” “Democracy”
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Every single time the land line ISPs have gotten money for rural broadband, they use it for something else and don’t build anything. Starlink actually built a network that works. Many places have gotten decent 5G home internet too.
I have been promised fiber for over a decade yet the only wired connection available is a DSL network that’s been so poorly maintained that it barely even functions.
Do you mean works or falls out of the sky routinely to litter the earth? We build lots as far as smaller ISPs go. You just don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.
Starlink is designed to demise on re-entry. It’s a core criteria.
What does that mean to you exactly? All the ones that burnt up early weren’t designed for that lmao
Ah yes, who needs fiber when you have an inferior product that will be worse in every calculable way?
Pay no attention to the person who stands to benefit from this deal. There’s definitely nothing illegal about it.
So what if the owner of Starlink just happened to spend a quarter of a billion dollars to get the current president elected? That surely has nothing to do with the abysmal Starlink service stealing away funding for critical infrastructure.
But just think how blazing fast the speeds will be! When they’re hurtling out of orbit and crashing into your house!
Starlink demises on re-entry.
Why would they fall out of orbit?
They deorbit every 5 years and burn up in the atmosphere they don’t make it to land (although i think i remember a a part of a very early version did and changes were made because it did, but that might have been something else)
There have been a couple launches where some solar radiation caused damage or a problem with the stage 2 and they all came down and burned up before they made their planned orbit. On occasion, there may be a faulty satellite that doesn’t reach its proper orbit after launch and instead comes down instead.
Short of an error during launches, it’s all planned.
Hundreds have already fallen out of orbit this year alone.
I think it’s mostly because they’re told to.
If your nationwide fibre internet plan rollout was even half as bungled and bullshit as ours here in Australia, it must be a shitshow. It was used as a political pawn, with one party wanting to NOT finish it so they could use it to help get them re-elected endlessly, and the other party opposing it because it wasn’t their idea, and pushing an alternative terrible plan that was far slower and far more expensive in the long term. In the end we got a terrible mix of both.
We’ve already given telecoms well over $100 billion, over the last 25 years, and they’ve done fuck all
I don’t recall labor not wanting to finish it? My recollection was that it was the libs not wanting to go through with it and that’s how we got fibre to the node after they were elected.
I get that running fibre all the way to every premises in rural areas like Alice Springs would have been ridiculous though.
Labor could have finished it easily if they wanted to, but they dragged their butts because they knew it was a vote winner. Just like almost every big issue, they never want to actually implement it fully because they want to continue using it to get re-elected.
Interesting, I had a lot of other things going on at the time so didn’t follow the issue as close as I would now. At least we’re finally getting FTTN transitioning to FTTP at the moment, 10 years too late.
Here I am WFH just fine on a 25/8 Mbps 4G cellular internet connection though. I do wish I had better connection but unfortunately not possible in my situation.
Hope you like satellite internet.
Not as much as I revile Musk.
This would be REALLY CORRUPT if the CEO of Starlink was ALSO cutting HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of American Jobs and SLASHING BILLIONS in Social Funding (like Social Security) just so we could Give Him these CONTRACTS! But FOX NEWS told me that was NOT true so it’s OK!
The plan’s lead architect, Evan Feinman, says that before he was forced out by the Trump administration in March, […] In March, Lutnick announced a “rigorous review” of BEAD, which he claims is too “woke” and filled with “burdensome regulations.” Now the plan may change.
Hatred really does make you do stupid things.
I miss dial up. Like local providers with 2 or 3 numbers to try.
I don’t, dial-up sucked.
Satellite and wired internet are not the future.
The future is to just use our phones and cell towers.
Hi, I’m someone working on the rural fiber expansions. Those are what we use to feed the cell towers. You don’t want to rely on microwave or what else have you.
Right. It’s way cheaper to connect cell towers than residences.
There’s no way we’re going to be laying down fiber to reach all or even most US residences.
Thing is, we already paid for connecting a majority residences. The corporations we paid just didn’t do it.
They weren’t just paid, they were paid repeatedly and they repeatedly didn’t do it.
80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban “fiberization” is absolutely within reach.
Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it’s probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.
it may be cheaper, but I fucking hate data caps.
I use Visible which has unlimited data for $25/month.
Username fits.
