Bad, bad memories of MFNX debacle (metromedia fiber networks). Verizon and Kluge hosed everyone.
Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
41–48 of 48 posts
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#42FWIW this is happening again in the UK right now with FTTH deployments. There are about 10-20 companies of fairly sizeable scale, with hundreds of millions of billons of GBP of funding laying fibre. I think this is a good thing for the country (it has forced Openreach & Virgin Media to massively accelerate their FTTP plans); but it is going to be cataclysmic for the investors. Firstly, the build cost is astronomical…
They have the low hanging fruit (large apartment blocks) sewen up and are now spreading out.
Last week I was excited to see FTTH guys cabling up my suburban street and was told it should go live in a month or so. I went onto their website and their register info form didn't work (and still doesn't) due to them using some broken Experian email validator script!
The fortune they're spending on roadworks etc yet their bloody signup form doesn't work!
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There was dedicated regulation, it was just taken up by states instead of the FCC https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/12/telecom-industry-ass-kis...
Interesting. I'm not sure "the entire west coast and huge swaths of the midwest and east coast have passed state-level net neutrality laws" is correct if this linked map is to be believed: https://www.naruc.org/nrri/nrri-activities/net-neutrality-tr...
Huge parts of the US apparently do not have such legislation, and it is unclear which states that "proposed" it have put it into law.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#44Earlier 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.
> nor is it a literal mile. The cost problem of the last mile is not for the 2 meters between the fiber router in the home and the living room. The issue with the "last mile" is that it used to be excessively expensive to lay fiber everywhere on the, literally, last mile outside people's home. I could plug a network card with an SFP port and have actual "fiber to the desktop" for the last three meters at my place but…
> The cost problem of the last mile is not for the 2 meters between the fiber router in the home and the living room. The issue with the "last mile" is that it used to be excessively expensive to lay fiber everywhere on the, literally, last mile outside people's home.
And yet it was done for electricity and telephones over a century ago. And fibre probably has a longer 'shelf-life' as it does not corrode, so the initial installation is more likely to last longer.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suppose this is what happens when infrastructure stops being funded by the government. I’ve got 3 current FTTH providers at my flat in London, I wasn’t even aware other companies were about and also offering the service. I guess this’ll be good for consumer costs in the short term before it inevitably implodes.
Nothing new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
Isn’t it fun seeing history endlessly repeat itself.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#46I'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.
640k should be enough for everyone right?
Eh, we knew <1mb was limiting. The fact that I had multiple drives was a sign.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#47I 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…
You seem to be agreeing with the author, who notably compares it with railway mania.
> Technologically, fiber communication has been a brilliant success.
> The bubble warped the financial picture. Looking back, Odlyzko compared the millennial bubble to the British rail- way mania of the 1840s ...
> Looking back, the most important lesson from the fiber optic mania may be that the most successful technologi- cal revolutions can be the messiest. The bigger the profit potential, the more manic investors become and the less critical judgement they use.
And the concrete takeaways depend on exactly who you are, but "selling out early" before the bubble pops seems to be the story of the big individual winners in this story.
Re: Boom, Bubble, Bust: The Fiber Optic Mania [pdf]
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flat? I don't think so. I'm at a coffee shop and looking around me, this is very different from just 20 years ago. People with laptops and smaetphones around me. Just 20 years ago, that same place saw a few CS major nerds with their laptops, everybody else sat with a book or some paper to write on or reading a paper newspaper. Still with a latte, but tech has changed everybody's life dramatically in 20 years. 20 year…
You're agreeing with the comment you replied to. they were saying it was flat until ~1700 or so.
They wrote that it "appears flat". I tried to contradict that.
> However from inside this bubble there is a sort of tech dilatation where everything appears normal and flat and it is only the future that has exponential growth.