✨Fiber optics cables and you. Why should you care?
Do you use the internet? Watch TV series, movies 📺? Chat with friends? Hell, if you do anything in this modern world 🌍 you have to care. Why? Let me take a stab at explaining it.
The internet is everywhere in our lives. It is incredible how quickly it has been adopted and continues to grow. It's so powerful that it has become an universal right. It's kind of ironic when you think it was a technology invented to mitigate nuclear armageddon.
The different layers of the internet
The internet is a network of networks. A helpful way to slice them is in networks that connect:
- continents
- countries and cities
- homes and businesses
Connecting Continents
The cables that connect continents are mind-boggling.
Some lunatics got together and said: “why don’t we run a cable from the coast of this continent to the coast of that other one over there?”
The map of how these cables connect our world is absolutely beautiful.
Do yourself a favor: go check out TeleGeography right now. It’s absolutely glorious.
Do like the rest of us and bask your office with geekness with a printed map. Here is mine.
Connecting Countries and Cities
When they hit land, these cables follow along various routes. It follows highways, railroads, and waterways. It goes underground and on poles. It’s as simple as digging a trench, laying the duct, and covering the trench. But over hundreds and thousands of kilometers.
Connecting Homes and Businesses
The last leg of this journey is connecting you to the Internet — often called access network. That’s the cabling running under your feet, on utility poles, and façades.
What do all these layers have in common? All of them are built with point-to-point fiber optic cables. Well, except the last leg, the access networks. In Belgium that last leg is connected with copper.
Why isn't your home connected to the internet with fiber?
Rico, why should it? That’s a great question. Many say that no one needs the speeds of fiber. Put that statement to the test with a simple ask: turn off 4G and 3G on their phones.
turn off 4G and 3G on their phones
Broadband evolution is like that story of the frog on slowly warming water. Not only we don’t realize that the water has been warming up; we take for granted that the water is much warmer than it ever was.
We are using tons more bandwidth now than ever before.
More people are connected to the Internet, we have more devices per capita, and our devices devour more and more bandwidth.
Meanwhile in Belgium, the Internet that reaches our home has not kept up.
Fine, we are hungry broadband troglodytes. You still haven’t explained why fiber will quench our thirst.
Simply put, fiber capacity grows as our needs grow.
The copper technologies — xDSL and DOCSIS — have been amazing at extending this old technology. But it doesn’t make sense to invest in them anymore: technologically and economically.
The different types of fiber in access technologies
Convinced that in the copper vs fiber, fiber is the way to go? Alright, let’s dive in a bit deeper. Let’s look at the different types of fiber in access technologies.
- PON — passive optical network
- P2P — point-to-point network
There are tons of arguments on why one or the other. For me it boils down to this:
- PON builds on the legacy of complexity that some telcos have put in place. Vendors love it because there are “upgrade paths” (aka sell equipment) and increased complexity (aka sell consultants hours). The consumer gets royally screwed because these networks are “optimized” to the maximum which means that they get low speeds, not much better than what coax players offer.
- P2P, in my highly biased view, is simpler, requires lower capital investment and operating cost, and give the consumers tons more.
As a consumer it’s not easy to know which type of network is serving you. The easiest tell that you have P2P is if the provider offers you symmetric speeds.
Symmetric speeds means that both the upload and download are the same. So, when you see an ad with 100 Mbps / 100 Mbps, that’s symmetric. Also, if it’s hard to find out what upload speed you have, it’s likely NOT symmetric.
Why should you care about symmetric uploads?
Most people think they only download so that’s the only thing that matters.
But that’s not always true.
Anytime you start a Skype or FaceTime call you need loads of upload bandwidth. If you don’t have it, the image that the other party sees will be laggy, choppy, and pixelated. The call will fail to give you the feeling that you’re there with the other party.
On top of that, the little device you have in your pocket can capture amazing video, up to 4k. For you to have an idea: to transmit a 4K video you would need about 18 Mbps! That’s a lot more than normal telcos provide (from 6 to 12 Mbps).
On top of that, your devices are constantly uploading to Dropbox, iCloud, and many other cloud services. That means that you have less available bandwidth. Add to that the fact that someone else in the house or neighborhood is also having a video chat and you have major congestion.
Symmetric speeds matter.
What can you do?
Demand better service. Demand more transparency from your provider.
If you happen to be a property developer in Belgium, reach out to us. Let’s talk! We are launching in Belgium in 2016 and we’re looking for forward-thinking property developers who want to make their projects future-proof, more attractive, and generate a new revenue stream.
