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crystalized
join:2013-04-19
Evansville, IN

crystalized

Member

Those of you who have fiber already, is it really worth it?

I live in a small town where only certain businesses shell out a ton of money to use the few fiber lines we have from WOW and Windstream. So it will probably be 10 years or more before the common folk gets to experience fiber.
But even if you do have fiber, is there really an increase in speed? Because I think most website servers top out at 20-25Mbps. I didn't notice a great increase in individual page loads when I went from 15Mbps to 50Mbps last year. The number of simultaneous page loads I can do has definitely increased, but a page itself has very little speed increase. I could see certain streaming services like Netflix possibly offering higher speeds to those with fiber.

What do you think about your current fiber speed in relation to website loading time?
Do you think in 10 years website servers will be faster to match the client's fiber speeds? Are businesses continuing to improve their infrastructure to serve up websites faster, or are they sitting on their hands since most visitors don't have that much speed anyway?
davidhoffman
Premium Member
join:2009-11-19
Warner Robins, GA

davidhoffman

Premium Member

There are some charts from the Measuring Broadband America reports that show what thousands of users cumulative experiences have been.

»www.fcc.gov/measuring-br ··· #Chart10

»www.fcc.gov/measuring-br ··· #Chart12

As you can see, your experience is not far off from what many others have seen. Above 15 Mbps, there is only about a 10% decrease in load times for a 75 Mbps connection.

The advantage is what you noted, the ability to do multiple simultaneous downloads or uploads with little degradation of any one download's data transfer rate.

So, with a 1 Gigabit symmetrical fiber connection you can probably do 4 different Full HDTV(1080p) Netflix downloads/streams simultaneously. At the same time you can be uploading 4 different Full HDTV(1080p) home videos to some cloud storage. In addition you can have 4 simultaneous video chats going on, while all 4 users wander through the World Wide Web. You can add in a multiple camera home security system recording to the cloud, and you still should not see any problems for any of those uses. Basically 32 HDTV feeds simultaneously with 15.625 Mbps easily available for each data transfer. A total of 500 Mbps. The other 500 Mbps can be available for routine cloud backups, software updates, security, and other applications running in the background.

That is an example of the advantages of a really capable fiber optic internet connection.
crystalized
join:2013-04-19
Evansville, IN

crystalized

Member

what awesome data charts! thank you for the link!
scross
join:2002-09-13
USA

scross to crystalized

Member

to crystalized
I read a couple years back that individual connections at the far end are often capped at 10Mbps, in order to keep speeds reasonable while still being able to service multiple connections. In other words, while you might have 1Gbps fiber on your end, the other end might very well only be talking to you at 10Mbps, even if they have a 1Gbps aggregate link themselves.

Also, while I've been generally upped the speed on my end as higher speeds became available (but nowhere near fiber speeds), I long ago noticed diminishing returns here. A real limiting factor on my end these days appears to be the speed at which my computer (which is several years old now) can render a page, said pages becoming more complex all the time. Another big factor is competition for the overall bandwidth, DNS servers, and such - if it's 5 AM then things may be screaming, but by an hour or two later (when the rest of the is getting online) things usually have slowed down considerably.

As it stands right now, if someone were to offer me fiber tomorrow I probably wouldn't be interested in it unless it was as cheap or cheaper than what I'm paying now. If I had to pay a premium for it then I wouldn't be interested at all.
davidhoffman
Premium Member
join:2009-11-19
Warner Robins, GA

davidhoffman

Premium Member

Ah, you have discovered that some FTTH or FTTP installations are really divided up to attempt to get close to a 1:1 contention on a link. A single GPON link may be split to 96 residences, thus giving each a 10 Mbps symmetrical connection. The ISP is also free to declare that all 96 premises have a Gigabit connection to the World Wide Web.
crystalized
join:2013-04-19
Evansville, IN

crystalized to scross

Member

to scross
I always have a high-end computer and router so that's never my problem. But I agree there's little incentive to pay for fiber when the other end will be slow anyways. My hope would be that as more customers get faster connections, the business end would speed up their servers to accommodate that. Because I thought that was the whole point of why Google is pushing fiber so hard. Because they want to offer larger content that takes a speedier connection to deal with.
davidhoffman
Premium Member
join:2009-11-19
Warner Robins, GA

davidhoffman

Premium Member

Google was dealing with severely asymmetrical speeds at the homes and small businesses that use its services. The Google web application engineers could come up with great ideas that worked well with symmetrical speeds. But that was not what the average home had in the USA. The speeds needed to run each of the applications was probably less than the 15 Mbps you have noted previously. So Google is trying to emphasize community wide symmetrical speeds as well as large bandwidth.

As has been noted elsewhere the LUS Fiber project allows any LUS Fiber subscriber to use a 100 Mbps symmetrical intranet. Google could probably have set its project at 100 Mbps symmetrical for its FTTH project. But that would not produce a catchy name or really allow web application designers to work with the idea of a really abundant internet connection system.