Archived Like water, bandwidth is also not an unlimited resource. Do you agree? (technology)
submitted ago by rms_returns
Posted by: rms_returns
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Archived on: 2/12/2017 1:51:00 AM
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Archived Like water, bandwidth is also not an unlimited resource. Do you agree? (technology)
submitted ago by rms_returns
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[–] vuke69 1 point 1 point 2 points (+2|-1) ago
There is a finite global capacity at any given moment, there is a maximum aggregate bandwidth between two given points, and there is also maximum bandwidth on a given link. All these things are constantly changing (except for last mile links).
Transit providers are constantly increasing capacity, but usage is increasing exponentially. If every transit provider stopped adding links, within weeks every pop would be saturated during peak periods, and within months continuously saturated. That would be bad. Latency and packet loss would shoot up, and effective bandwidth would drop further, making the problem cascade.
Currently transit providers are running 10G & 40G on their fastest links, and adding more as fast as they can light them up. Within a pop some of the single links are as fast as 100G, but you have a pretty limited distance on that. There's still quite a bit of dark fiber out there, but I'm not sure how much of it will certify at 10G. Most is from the dot-com boom and only good up to 1G. They are constantly pulling new fiber as well. There are things like DWDM that can increase the capacity of individual fibers, but that's not heavily leveraged due to cost. At most they might use four wavelengths (so 4x10G) on a fiber that is just too expensive to add to, but that's out of a maximum of 72. There's also some new multicore glass that's promising.
[–] wylan 0 points 3 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago
Here is an example of the gross amounts of Dark Fiber that is available in a city near me . My friend worked for the school district when they put in the fiber:
The school district (I worked at) owns a shitload of dark fiber that is already spread out across the city in a 50 mile radius. Problem is that, because it was taxpayer funded, it cannot be used for commercial purposes. So there are thousands of gigabits worth of fiber sitting in the ground, but they aren't allowed to let the public use it unless it was free to the taxpayers (since they already paid for the fiber in the first place)
Nobody will want to pony up the dough to light the fiber up if they can't charge for it so the spine is there collecting dust, with no nerves connected to anything to give you an idea of how much potential it has: we core-drilled and installed TWO fiber conduits to every school in the district, and in the conduit installed 144-strand cables. To provide a whopping redundant 20-gigabit pair of connections to each school, we only needed 4 strands. so every part of city, including two adjacent towns, have 142 dark strands running through town. 710 gigabit capacity, collecting dust, or 1420 gig if you take away the redundant pair
[–] vuke69 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
And the crazy thing is, that's probably not even an extreme example.
That sounds like a decent metro loop though, it's a shame they can't lease some of it out. That could bring some serious cash flow into the district.