How much for fiber optic line into each US home?

[diogen]

As it turns out, 100 billion.
Fixing US broadband: $100 billion for fiber to every home

A pile of money.
But to put it into perspective, Microsoft just offered almost half as much for Yahoo!

When/if this is done, optical media distribution can be declared dead.

Good read. Don't skip the links in that article.

Diogen.

EDIT: Bush actually does have a plan
We have a broadband strategy? Bush administration says "yes" in cheerleading report
But it would probably be the next administration that would call his plan what it deserves and do something about it.

 

[teamerickson]

Why did you put this in the War Zone?

 

[diogen]

Why did you put this in the War Zone?

I think this has to do with the VOD vs. optical media distribution arguments...

Diogen.

 

[Ilya]

Good read. And a rather surprizing chart...

Of course it's easier to run the fiber in smaller countries, but still...

 

[berck]

The report missed a project in Utah called UTOPIA. I'm kind of surprised by that, but its not a state project. It's one where a bunch of individual cities got together to pull it off. Most households can typically get 15Mbps and can get 50Mbps if you want to pay for it. Its rated to do 100Mbps per house hold and 1Gbps per business.

 

[charper1]

I think the biggest reason for this is simple, the companies controlling the US market wish to drag their feet to maximize the high prices they can charge for the slowest speed possible for the longest amount of time.

 

[gadgtfreek]

I think the biggest reason for this is simple, the companies controlling the US market wish to drag their feet to maximize the high prices they can charge for the slowest speed possible for the longest amount of time.

That sounds familiar

 

[diogen]

...companies controlling the US market wish to drag their feet to maximize the high prices they can charge...

Somewhat similar to what happend shortly after telecoms started offering ADSL (the A stands for asymmetric).
To preserve their huge profit margins in ISDN being sold to businesses (often 10 times as much as ADSL), the upstream bandwidth was degraded to not more than 1/4 of the downstream.
Symmetric DSL (SDSL) was priced comparably to ISDN.

Diogen.

 

[tonyp56]

LOL hahahahahhaha


Where I am at I don't even have DSL (actually am within distance, however, there is a coil in the line so therefore no DSL for me), phone company (AT&T) won't/hasn't tried to expand their coverage area to include me for DSL, nor have they given any kind of estimate of when something like this might happen.

Now of course, installing a remote terminal would be expensive, however, I would think, no where as expensive as replacing all of the copper in my area with fiber. At the very least, running a fiber run to supply broadband to several houses (a remote terminal if you think about it).

Would I like this? Of course, I would enjoy not having satellite for my broadband connection. However, if AT&T isn't even willing to bring new technology, update their existing copper line, install a RT, etc. in my area, what makes anyone think they'd ever (say in the next 50 years) run fiber to the home, curb, neighborhood node, or any other fiber run for broadband?

I also have an issue with the one billion price tag. Sounds awful low, perhaps to run fiber to every home in major cities, however, rural areas, mountain areas, etc. would have to have fiber ran throughout, and though not as many houses, it would still cost money, and no phone company is gonna do that unless they can make their money back in the first year. (why would a company want to take a loss, cause their stock price to fall, and lose millions on-top of the cost of doing the upgrade?)

 

[foghorn2]

As the internet is already destroying life as we know it for human beings in America, imagine what fiber will do to them.

.......look at already what cheap cell phones have done to them.

 

[diogen]

As it turns out, in Japan there are bandwidth limits for internet use, too: upload 1TB and you will be cut off.
NTT to Impose Broadband Upload Limits - Yahoo! News

Thats upload; 30GB of it per day is just fine. Just what we might be limited by in downloads per month
Bandwidth Barons Want More Money for Fewer Bytes - GigaOM

Download limits in Japan? Don't be stupid...

Anybody wanna guess how long until English language websites are as rare as Vietnamese are today?

Diogen.

 

[navychop]

I also have an issue with the one billion price tag. Sounds awful low, ....

It's 100 billion.

Doesn't matter. No chance at all of us seeing this in our lifetime. Maybe by some stroke of luck we'll see some part of it.

 

[mike123abc]

Only way it would ever happen is if they taxed all the internet connections like they do with phone lines to pay for the rural areas.