From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Tue Jul 03 2001 - 16:29:39 MDT
Eugene Leitl wrote:
>
> On Tue, 3 Jul 2001, Brian D Williams wrote:
>
> > 250 billion is the lowball figure just to rewire the U.S. with
> > fiber.
>
> Say, that's a lot of fiber. Given that modern fiber can carry few TBps,
> and hollow core fiber even more, what are you going to do with the
> bandwidth? What's wrong with LoS and wireless for the last mile?
Actually for the kind of money Brian is talking about ($2500 to wire
your house for fiber), he must be talking about PONs (passive optical
networks) where there is no active equipment between the CO and the
homes... it's sorta like a super-cable-modem where each house only
gets one wavelength from a shared piece of fiber that runs down the
neighborhood street. If you actually wanted a "few TBps" to your
house the equipment required to send and receive all those wavelengths
is much much more expensive, not to mention that simply wiring each
house with a totally unique fiber path would cost a lot more in fiber-
laying expense.
moral of story: people often overlook costs of actually lighting up the
fiber.
-- Brian Atkins Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://www.singinst.org/
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