I think that is the right answer, but the government seems to have fallen out of love with fiber and is smitten with mobile wireless, which in their future will replace everything.
The right answer may not prevail, in the face of power and money. Once upon a time we focused on 20 and 30 year infrastructure solutions. Look at how easily you can upgrade a fiber network. Then look at what it took to go from 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G, and imagine having to do that for 20-30 more years, through 6G and 7G and 8G and beyond. Where all that spectrum will come from, who knows. No similar problem exists with fiber. The ironic thing is that the biggest stumbling block to rural millimeter wave based 5G would be running fiber to all those towers. If you're going to run fiber to everybody's personal cell tower (because the houses are half a mile apart), why not just run the fiber to their house. -----Original Message----- From: AF <af-boun...@af.afmug.com> On Behalf Of Adam Moffett Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2020 8:35 PM To: af@af.afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] The Future Right now on fiber we're blinking the light on and off like the people a hundred years ago sending morse code by blinking a radio on and off. Right now you can run 9600 gbps with commercial off the shelf hardware, blinking 96 different colored lights. Some day you'll have one set of optics running all those wavelengths at the same time and modulating them all. Then that one fiber will carry tens of thousands of gigabits per second. I don't know if that's "future proof" enough for the long haul, but it ought to be good enough for the next 30 years I should think. -Adam On 1/19/2020 9:29 PM, Matt Hoppes wrote: > I don’t know why, but this evening got me thinking about broadband delivery > over the past 30 years and the future of broadband. > > First we had nothing, then along came dial-up and that was amazing and many > companies sprung up offering the service. Giants like AOL and Prodigy. > > Then DSL and Cable came along as well as wireless and dial-up has all but > died. > > Now DSL is basically dead, cable and wireless have gone through several > iterations and we are seeing a push to fiber. > > What’s the possibility in the next 10 years cable and wireless will be dead > technologies with fiber at the fore front? Possibly. > > But then..... is fiber really future proof? We are talking about investing > hundreds of millions into fiber infrastructure, because it’s “the future”. > But is it? > > So far every technology delivery mechanism to date has become obsolete in as > little as 6-10 years. -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
