Comment 161H2 Re: I thought we had it bad here

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High speed internet is destroying neighborhoods

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I thought we had it bad here (Score: 1, Informative)

by Anonymous Coward on 2016-03-04 08:25 (#15Z3M)

In Dunedin, New Zealand, we "won" a marketing campaign called Gigatown. It was supposed to present us with the fastest internet in the southern hemisphere, we would have gigabit and we would have it first. Nobody else would have it until well after we did.
It turns out that the competitors of the company installing it have finished a half dozen towns, at least one of them much bigger than Dunedin, and the company installing it here - Chorus - have completed installation in a bunch of smaller towns. I'm told by a local electrician that Chorus are doing a terrible job, instead of doing fibre to the door of each house they're splitting a fibre cable between houses, something which they'll have to redo across the entire nation in a few years, and are refusing to guarantee their connection speeds with some people experiencing xDSL-like speeds.
Anyway, we've got construction crews running up and down the street, stereos blaring from very early in the morning until the end of the day, digging up holes, blocking roads, low speed zones, that kind of thing. It's annoying as all hell, but nowhere near as bad as that crap!

Re: I thought we had it bad here (Score: 1)

by wilson@pipedot.org on 2016-03-04 08:45 (#15Z4R)

Well FTTC (fiber to the cabinet) is much more common than FTTH (fiber to the home). It's not an issue per se, it can still deliver speeds of 100Mb/s - 400Mb/s depending on the configuration. They don't use just one cable though (not because of the speed, the theoretical capacity of a fiber cable is somewhere north of 1 Pb/s, well above of what your ISP will power it with), the reason why they use multiple cables is because fiber cable is quite fragile and you don't want to end up redoing miles of cabling because you were stupid enough to just use 1 cable. It seems to me that your local electrician might be exaggerating the story.

Re: I thought we had it bad here (Score: 2, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2016-03-04 21:47 (#161H2)

We're supposed to get fibre to the home, rather than just the cabinet. My brother's neighbours get 800 megabits, he only gets 250 on a good day. If he turns on his broadband Sky, which his ISP claim won't impact his network speeds at all, he drops down to 50 megabits or less. (I suspect he's mixing up connection speed, and network transfer rates.)

Our ISP is a state-owned one, who were well known for shady deals and typical big-business reasoning. Their CEO went on TV around 2008 and complained that opening up the market to competition was unfair, because they'd be forced to compete in areas where they made the largest profits and that just wasn't fair. Didn't even try to disguise what she was saying.

Moderation

Time Reason Points Voter
2016-03-06 21:42 Interesting +1 hyper@pipedot.org
2016-03-07 13:40 Interesting +1 wilson@pipedot.org

Junk Status

Marked as [Not Junk] by bryan@pipedot.org on 2016-05-06 23:02