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Old 05-23-2014, 09:59 AM   #702
Undertoad
Radical Centrist
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Cottage of Prussia
Posts: 31,423
Quote:
Why do others countries bother having high speeds?
They're subject to the same marketing and misunderstanding of the net as we are. While at the same time, being much more densely populated means they can swap all their copper for fiber at low cost. Once you have fiber the whole way, there are fewer limitations on what you can do.

At some point it is not much more expensive to provide 1000 Mb/s than it is to provide 20 Mb/s. Once you run fiber for the entire connection, it's just physics, you suddenly have a tremendous amount of bandwidth. So the initial run is very expensive but suddenly the bandwidth is cheap.

OK BUT let's imagine that BANDWIDTH, 1000Mb/s or 20Mb/s, is like the number of lanes in a highway to downtown.

If you have a lot of land, you can build a 100 lane highway. That's wonderful and all but if you only have 8 cars per day that want to get downtown, it won't be any faster with a 100 lane highway than with a 2 lane.

The speed limit will be much more important. I would say speed limit = latency, but the metaphor soon starts to break down. Everything is actually going at the speed of light. I must stop now because if the metaphor gets worse it may cause harm to the whole thread.
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