| uhh ... ever heard of a (US) BACKBONE!!! So all you ppl are salivating over 400mbps service, but you keep forgetting the obvious question -- you need the backbone speed to ... uhh ... "back that up"  I do backbone networks for a living and believe me, with the exception of a VERY FEW backbone ISP's (we say "Tier 1"), most ISP's will only have 1gb, maybe 2gb total to the other ISP's ("peers"). Yeah, you hear of Cisco's 10gb equipment, but there has to be matching available fiber to use that bandwidth. In the large cities, there's still both dark fiber and small local metro fiber companies that can accommodate 10gb fiber. But on the nationwide fiber networks, there's very little and it's very expensive. For the national ISP's themselves, they're still recovering their investment in OC-192 (9.5gbps) equipment, which cost(ed) 10x more than current 10gbps equipment.
"But there is plenty of DWDM fiber all over the country ...", sure -- YOU go and price some of that equipment and/or lighted "waves" yourself and see if it breaks down cost-effectively to X-amount of GPON customers.
"But Level 3 says they carry giggle-bytes of traffic on their multiple 1000TBps connections ...", uh huh ... does your ISP have that same bandwidth to Level 3? I'll bet you some expensive Cisco routers they do not. Not with the prices Level 3 charges!
Even for the (very large) Tier 1 ISP I used to work for, they have only 4gbps total cross country. Let's see -- that's only 10 GPON customers. Not a very good business model. Granted that a lot of that b/w can be used locally for things like HD IPTV, etc. |
 aaronwtPremium
join:2004-11-07
Woodbridge, VA | I'm happy with my 30mbs service. If there was any increase it would be nice to get 50mbs service for the same $55 price, but 400mbs service is overkill, at least for residential. I could see it being popular for businesses. |
