While I have all kinds of appreciation for the capability of fiber optics, in part, from seeing the demo at the Corning Museum in NY decades ago, I am way less impressed with management.
The biggest cable, 24 conductor, in the country goes right by my place. When they put it in they said they were only going to use four: State, Fed, Mil. and utility. The rest were in reserve, presumably so maybe I could hook into one? Can I use it? No bleeping way. Can’t be done, they say. Extremely tricky and technical, they say. It’s right BY MY PLACE. I’d even fire up the trencher and dig my own hookup hole.
That was nearly two decades ago. A few months back a crew showed up to dig in a couple of new access boxes. Big concrete guys. I told the guys they were picking a bad spot since the highway shoulder at my place is extra wide and disabled vehicles pull over there often.
Did they pay attention to me? nnnoooowwwaaaay. Just a few weeks after they left we had a big rain storm. Buried the new boxes under half a foot of water so’s they had to re-fill the gravel and pump them out, the holes being in solid rock.
Then about a month later a passing honey truck blew an axle and drug itself right over said new boxes beating the snot out of them again. Not sure if there’s a karma monster involved because they’re so dam backward about letting us local folks use their little glass wire but in the mean time their maintenance fakter is impressive?
And I wasn’t even using my own backhoe when things went south.
We still don't know how much data a single fiber can carry. The limitation is the bandwidth and processing power of the servers on each end of the fiber.
Light travels 29.9792458 cm in one nanosecond. This means that making the server faster rapidly runs up against speed-of-light constraints. A clock-speed of one Gigahertz means that you can't complete very many clock cycles or read/write very much data before things break down.
WWG1WGA
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)