Technology Futures

Here is a guy who thinks we have too much fiber. With even the cable companies reluctantly beginning to deploy fiber in some markets, this has to be an article written to support the wireless industry. The write also suggests the useful life of fiber is only about twenty-five years. He may be basing this on the IRS allowable depreciation schedule of 24 years, but a quick Internet search will turn up many first hand reports of fiber cable operating successfully for thirty years or more.

While the glass fiber does have some very slow signal deterioration, advances in network electronics have been able to not only keep older fiber cables working but actually expand capacity, usually by orders of magnitude.

What the article does not tell you is that broadband and cellular wireless networks require much more frequent upgrades, typically nearly total replacement every five to seven years.

Fiber is still a terrific investment, and yes, it does future proof your community.

Someone dredged up a video from my old employer AT&T about how to use the new-fangled dial telephone. Made in 1940, it is quite entertaining. You can skip to the 10 minute mark to get to the instructions on how to dial a phone. It's quite a statement to think that AT&T thought this was needed. On the other hand, in 1993, as we rolled out the ground-breaking Blacksburg Electronic Village, we spent a lot of time instructing people on how to use a mouse. We should have videotaped some of those sessions for posterity.

Our cable provider for our home Internet just sent us a notice telling us we were getting a free upgrade upload speed. It will be going from "...up to 5 Meg" to a whopping "...up to 10 Meg!"

Wow! Color me excited!

Meanwhile, I have to drive back and forth to the office for evening videoconferences because I can't trust the cable Internet service at home if there are more than a couple of people on the conference call. I really don't think doubling it to "up to 10 Meg" is going to make much difference.

And notice that they are not promising 10 Meg. It's the old "up to..." mantra, meaning you might get the max speed if you get up at 2AM in the morning when none of your neighbors are doing anything.

Meanwhile, our Blacksburg fiber to the home project (wideopenblacksburg.net) is offering 250/250 Meg SYMMETRIC service for $65/month.

Why don't I have that service? We live outside of town on the side of very rocky hill, and it is going to take us a while to get fiber out there. The cable Internet was installed almost 30 years ago.

We get calls every week asking if Starlink is going to eliminate the need for terrestrial broadband solutions like rural fiber and fixed point wireless broadband.

The short answer is, "No."

Starlink is a substantial improvement over traditional geosynchronous orbit satellite Internet (e.g. Hughesnet, Viasat), but it is still going to have much higher latency than terrestial wireless, and its bandwidth will never get close to Gig fiber.

This article indicates that Starlink performance (still in beta testing) is highly variable. Starlink promises that latency and bandwidth will improve as it adds more satellites. But more satellites will also mean more users, and that bandwidth is shared.

This article discusses problems the Starlink customer equipment is having with overheating in Arizona--and perhaps other places. The article also estimates that Starlink will likly only be able to service a maximum of about 1% of the U.S. Internet market.

For rural residents that are stuck with slow DSL or low performance geosynchronous satellite services, Starlink is going to be a big improvement. Here at Design Nine and WideOpen Networks, we see Starlink as part of a toolkit of solutions. But it is not "the solution."