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Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

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Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#21

Post by senttoschool »

KirillPanov wrote: post #4

Yeah the phone companies laid those thick 144-strand bundles before wave division multiplexing. They figured the only way to get more bandwidth was more fibers, right? WDM came along and caught them with their pants down; now all of a sudden you could just attach different devices to the ends of the fiber and get 16x the bandwidth. No backhoes needed. Then CWDM let you split and combine channels in locations without…

>Yeah the phone companies laid those thick 144-strand bundles before wave division multiplexing. They figured the only way to get more bandwidth was more fibers, right?

I don't know anything about fiber tech but can't they just apply the newer techniques to the already laid out 144 strand bundles?

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#22

Post by cmrdporcupine »

sandworm101 wrote: post #14
mangeld wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the country, where I live it's pretty common to have fiber to the home. Everything runs on that, internet, cable tv and phone calls.

But in other areas most residential bandwidth increasingly comes from wireless techs. Even in homes with wired service, nearly everyone uses wifi rather than wires, let alone fiber to end machines. The last mile is generally not fiber, nor is it a literal mile.

Indeed many people, including myself are now in the weird backwards world where the WAN is far faster than the LAN.

I have a 3gbps fiber link straight to my house. The only machines in the house that can use anything close to it are the ones that hook up to my USB-C docking station which has a 2.5gbps ethernet port. Everything else is WiFi speeds.

EDIT: This was a sudden change. I live rural and for the last 10 years I only had 10-15mbps speeds top, and most recently only by point to point wireless from a tower 5km away.

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#23

Post by YesThatTom2 »

The follow-up article should be about Google.

Google saw the bandwidth glut (global fiber deployments were over-provisions and under-utilized) and took advantage of this. While earlier starts were in a "bandwidth is expensive" mentality, Google designed in a "bandwidth is cheap" mentality. It gave them a big advantage both in cost of operations and ability to design large scale systems differently than previous competitors had been able to.

There was also a datacenter/colo glut. Google was buying up every datacenter square foot they could find. They could get it at pennies on the dollar just like bandwidth.

This lasted until around 2009-ish when both gluts were exhausted. Google turned to running their own fiber and building their own datacenters just in time.

TL;DR: Google's insight into the economics of global bandwidth and datacenter gluts became an advantage in the early years.

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#24

Post by hammock »

sandworm101 wrote: post #14
mangeld wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the country, where I live it's pretty common to have fiber to the home. Everything runs on that, internet, cable tv and phone calls.

But in other areas most residential bandwidth increasingly comes from wireless techs. Even in homes with wired service, nearly everyone uses wifi rather than wires, let alone fiber to end machines. The last mile is generally not fiber, nor is it a literal mile.

This. Only a few years ago Hacker News commenters were crying out for new laws and regulations to subsidize the construction of Google Fiber to every home in America. “It’s a basic human right” they would say.

On the sideline there were a much, much smaller minority who looked at those comments in horror, with the context of knowing that wireless was a serious alternative that wasn’t that far away and was being broadly ignored

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#25

Post by throw0101c »

libealistand wrote: post #9

I don't get the drama. To me this looks like a normal process in an industry that discovered a groundbreaking technology. A new technology pops up, everybody rushes to innovate, lots of actors do nonsense, some do the right thing, but for many of them you don't know beforehand which is which. So you throw money at all of them. The rush creates some really good ideas and innovations. And a lot of BS and wrong decision…

> Today fiber is the network tech. Except for the last mile, everything is fiber.

(G)PON, (gigabit) passive optical network, seems to be what everyone is moving to:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_optical_network

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPON

Even for wireless (LTE/4G, 5G), GPON seems to be used for backhaul:

* https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8650520

* https://www.lightwaveonline.com/5g-mobile/article/14188094/t...

IEEE 802.3ca-2020 allows for 25 GigE per lambda, being able to combine two for 50 GigE; I'm sure there's an ITU equivalent (or will be soon).

* https://www.itu.int/hub/2021/06/new-itu-standards-to-boost-f...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_Speed_PON

The main 'semi-hold out' are cablecos, where they are pushing fibre closer and closer to the premises, but generally haven't yet decided to replace co-ax in people's homes yet:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#26

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

hammock wrote: post #24
sandworm101 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in other areas most residential bandwidth increasingly comes from wireless techs. Even in homes with wired service, nearly everyone uses wifi rather than wires, let alone fiber to end machines. The last mile is generally not fiber, nor is it a literal mile.

This. Only a few years ago Hacker News commenters were crying out for new laws and regulations to subsidize the construction of Google Fiber to every home in America. “It’s a basic human right” they would say. On the sideline there were a much, much smaller minority who looked at those comments in horror, with the context of knowing that wireless was a serious alternative that wasn’t that far away and was being broad…

The network neutrality discussion belongs in the same bucket. People thought it would be the end of the open internet if there wasn’t a dedicated regulation.

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#27

Post by bombcar »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #22
sandworm101 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in other areas most residential bandwidth increasingly comes from wireless techs. Even in homes with wired service, nearly everyone uses wifi rather than wires, let alone fiber to end machines. The last mile is generally not fiber, nor is it a literal mile.

Indeed many people, including myself are now in the weird backwards world where the WAN is far faster than the LAN. I have a 3gbps fiber link straight to my house. The only machines in the house that can use anything close to it are the ones that hook up to my USB-C docking station which has a 2.5gbps ethernet port. Everything else is WiFi speeds. EDIT: This was a sudden change. I live rural and for the last 10 years…

The advantage of a fast WAN is you can put it into a capable router (2.5-5-10g) and break it out into multiple clients who can use it simultaneously even if at only 1g each.

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#28

Post by hospitalJail »

anonylizard wrote: post #3

Instant analogy to GPUs... A similar story is found in the railway bubble bursts in the US. Railways are also incredibly revolutionary technologies that reshaped societies, doesn't mean they are immune from investment cycles. That being said, given ChatGPT was only released 8 months ago, we are probably very early in the GPU boom, far from bubble yet.

Computing seems pretty important. I have a usecase that can save our company millions of dollars, but unless my company is willing to spend hundreds of thousands on a computer, its not happening. (It may not work, and prototypes still have me conflicted if it will work). We also can't rent servers for this, too confidential.

If we can get prices down 10x-100x, I can even do this for personal/home usecases. I know that sounds extreme/absurd, but given our office is nearly empty with WFH, we can use larger computers and no one would mind.

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#29

Post by TacticalCoder »

mangeld wrote: post #12
libealistand wrote: post #9

I don't get the drama. To me this looks like a normal process in an industry that discovered a groundbreaking technology. A new technology pops up, everybody rushes to innovate, lots of actors do nonsense, some do the right thing, but for many of them you don't know beforehand which is which. So you throw money at all of them. The rush creates some really good ideas and innovations. And a lot of BS and wrong decision…

Depends on the country, where I live it's pretty common to have fiber to the home. Everything runs on that, internet, cable tv and phone calls.

Indeed. I had FTTH in Spain, in Andorra 100% of the (tiny) country has FTTH, I'm in the middle of absolutely nowhere in France atm: rural/seaside (about 45 mins to an hour drive to the closest highway) and yet I've got FTTH.

And at my new place in Luxemburg I've got FTTH too.

Fiber to the home is becoming incredibly common in many countries.

My brother had fiber to the home in 2003 already... In Japan (Tokyo).

Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]

#30

Post by hospitalJail »

I'm not limited by my download/upload speed. Heck, 4G or 5G, whatever is on my phone, is absurdly fast.

I don't see the demand for consumers.

Heck, outside AI, the computer isn't even my bottleneck. Up until ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion was released, I thought computing was near end-game for consumer needs.

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