> What's preventing the average Joe from enjoying 1+Tb/s broadband?

are other responders not seeing the 'T'?

it is the rare home device which can handle 2.5Gbps. 10Gbps switches are common enough. the cheapest switch i'm seeing on fs.com with a 100Gbps uplink port is $3500.

i don't think we currently have the tech to drive 100Gbps through a single port, i think it's done with multiple wavelengths being multiplexed onto a single fiber, and then split back out.

so... at a minimum, joe is kept from 1 Tbps of bandwidth by $35,000, some optical multiplexing hardware, 10+U of rack space, and having absolutely no conceivable way to put the kind of bandwidth to use.

plus his part of the amortized capital costs to build the ISP's end of that.

You wouldn't even be able to transfer the data out of memory at speed. Even if you overclocked your DDR4 ram to crazy levels - you'd tap out at 50GB/s - a far cry from 1Tbs/s.

There is very little practical use to speeds beyond 10 gigabit for home use unless you have some insane PCIE storage or keep a giant ram drive. (Which again asks the practical use category - what are you doing?)

> There is very little practical use to speeds beyond 10 gigabit for home use

Give it a few years and we'll all be wondering how SPA web apps became gigabytes in size and trying to work out how to make 1Tbs/s to the home practical.

100G per wavelength has been standard fare for some time now.

The confusion is probably due to the fact that you can also run the 100G using multiple lanes at lower speeds.

It all depends on what optics you use.

You also don’t need 10U worth of rack space to switch 1 Tbps. You can do that with a single 1U switch.

> 100G per wavelength has been standard fare for some time now.

fair enough.

> You also don’t need 10U worth of rack space to switch 1 Tbps. You can do that with a single 1U switch.

how much does that cost?

List price for a 32x 100G switch is $30k, but nobody pays list price.

About six grand on eBay.

Edit: for reference, the FS switch with 1.2 Tbps of switching capacity is $4k new.

Monopolies like ComcastNBCUniversal who have pretty much every congressman/woman in their pocket.

This. I have a friend with 1Gbps up/down at his house. I've been waiting for fiber for like 10 years but it's never been available at any place I've lived. This is despite the fact that we live in the same (relatively small) county. This situation could only be possible if they just didn't care about making fiber available to everyone.

Nothing prevents it, except practicality: running enough fibers to support a terabit point to point is already hard enough. Add in needing to support millions of people and it becomes impossible. As is, internet routers and fiber links already use tons of power. Asking for 1000xing that just can't happen without a dyson sphere or something.

I don't know if I'd go that far - we can probably get more than 1000x throughput without absorbing the whole power of the sun - but it would require some meaningful amounts of infrastructure improvements and replacements.

Fair enough. I used a dyson sphere as a shorthand for "a power generation technology giving us orders of magnitude more power than we are generating now"

Congestion?

The fact that the server Joe is pulling from won't feed that file to him at that rate going out its own locally attached ethernet? (Due to either throttling, or serving stuff thousands of others?)

There is a seven lane highway three miles from where Joe lives; why can't he drive to his friend across town in 3 minutes?

Aside from the actual fiber itself: literally your entire computer. No part of a modern consumer computing device has 1Tb/s bandwidth - RAM, SSDs, networking cards, PCI, the front-side bus, and everything else, with the possible exception of the L1 cache[1], have maximum bandwidths well below 1Tb/s (= 125 GiB/s).

[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/329789/how-c...

Oversubscribed neighborhood trunk lines prevent me from enjoying my 80Mbs down somewhat regularly.

His (and all of his neighbors') Wi-Fi setup.