Re:Why the NBN needs to go the full way
by johnchristopher on Saturday September 07, 2013 @07:17AM
(#6344722)
> Gen 1 of fibre is already 10x better than the last generation of copper - how much better will generation 2, 3, 4 be? And fibre is potentially even more upgradeable than copper - it's just a channel for light, the throughput is limited by the boxes at either end which can be incrementally upgraded at low cost.
Not really. There is still a physical limit to how many light paths you can have in one fiber wire. If applications are relying more and more on available bandwidth and if more people or more connections are being made (and this is the case and it shows no signs of slowing down) you will want to increase bandwidth because the network will suffer congestion and then you are going to need to dig in the ground and install an additional bunch of physical cables. And that costs more than just tweaking the boxes at the edge of the network.
Not really. There is still a physical limit to how many light paths you can have in one fiber wire. If applications are relying more and more on available bandwidth and if more people or more connections are being made (and this is the case and it shows no signs of slowing down) you will want to increase bandwidth because the network will suffer congestion and then you are going to need to dig in the ground and install an additional bunch of physical cables. And that costs more than just tweaking the boxes at the edge of the network.