How to get 10Gbit/s home broadband in the US: Step 1. Move to Chattanooga, TN Chattanooga, Tennessee: a Bible Belt city with a population of 170,000, ish. Winner of the All-America City Award in 1962. The birthplace of the tow truck and Moon Pies (that's Wagon Wheels to Brits). The Glenn Miller Orchestra even made a record in honor of the place. Speaking of records, the city is now offering 10Gbps …
But imagine the benefit of the increased speeds of watching your conflagaration at 10Gb! Of course at DSL speeds, it might be fun to watch you squirming your way to their brand of hell.
Just slightly more seriously, I've been a bit amazed at how some of those deep-red-clay-soul places have pretty good infrastructure. Not just mega-churches, but real businesses. The devil works in mysterious ways!
America is a farm. The citizens are the animals to be milked and slaughtered for the profit of the corporations and the rich. The politicians are paid by the corporations and the rich to make sure the animals stay in their places and obey.
While Chattanooga and other cities with far younger municipal networks are pioneering and innovating faster than their corporate counterparts, the city council of Tacoma is debating practically giving away the oldest functioning municipal network in the United States (Cable Network) because finding ways to fix it would be too hard and libertarians in Washington state are opposed to government everything. Instead of innovating, they have let a succession of incompetent utility executives squander a nearly fifteen year headstart. Instead of leaping headfirst into the modern era with data heavy entertainment (Youtube, Netflix, Twitch), they floundered under the mistaken impression that cable television would always hold a monopoly over our eyeballs. Every facet of the city council's and Tacoma Public Utilities' operation of Click has been a disappointment, and the leaders of what is otherwise a fine city should be ashamed of themselves for letting the one competitive edge they have over Seattle go to waste.
It's a shame. What's more, it's a shame that I can't seem to get the Register to even cover it.
How many devices would you need to properly utilise this connection?
WIFI stops at just under 1Gbps. You'd need 12 802.11AC access points going, and somehow prevent them from interfering with one another.
10 machines all equipped with gigabit Ethernet could do it, assuming there weren't any other bottlenecks within the machine to slow it down. (How fast are SSDs these days? SATA based ones will struggle.) More realistically, it'd need to be hundreds.
A school or large business could use a connection like this, but not a small residence.
How many desktop motherboards come with 10GbE on-board?
How many laptops come with 10GbE?
Are there any USB3→10GbE or Thunderbolt→10GbE adaptors?
It's good that they're thinking ahead, but me thinks this is going to be one big white elephant, with only the rich or stupid rushing in on it. It'd be great if you can afford the 10GbE networking switches and network cards to plug into your desktop and server boxes. DIY web server? Bring it on!
I can see some rich fool buying this and plugging it into a 802.11AC access point only to look up crappy videos that would make the Nyan cat look like high-fidelity.
Anyone with a little less cash and more brains would see it just isn't worth it. Not for a $300/month premium. It's good that they've been forward-thinking enough to have gear that can support it. Thumbs up on that. It's worth having the fibres laid that can carry this speed, since that's the expensive bit to replace. But speed for speed's sake? Someone hasn't thought this through.
So I guess your world is all WiFi, USB, and laptops? You probably don't need a 10GbE connection.
But there are plenty of 10GbE PCI cards at reasonable cost. and you can even connect them up via Thunderbolt. WiFi isn't up to the task, but they make these things called cables that will work just fine at that speed.
OK, switches are still overpriced, but if more ISPs would offer 10GbE connections prices would not only drop for switches, but you'd start seeing more motherboard and laptop connections. Very much chicken and egg, but the ISPs are the ones really dragging their heels.
As for the home use case, have you looked at 4K UHD HDR streaming bandwidth requirements?
(Not that anyone truly "needs" any broadband. But it does make life more pleasant.)
>(How fast are SSDs these days? SATA based ones will struggle.)
10GbE is 1.25GB/s. We're talking about bits so you have to divide by 8.
From the specs of a Samsung 850 SATA SSD: Up to 520 MBps, or half a 10 gig line. And that is slow. The 950 models (M.2 interface) are 2,500MB/s, or twice as fast as 10GbE.
The latest gen SSD's have accelerated far beyond our pitiful bandwidth here.
The question isn't how fast your storage is, it is how fast you actually need data. Except when you are transferring large files, which is something most people don't do that often and when they do don't care if it happens in 10 seconds rather than two minutes, it becomes a question of how fast you need real time data.
That's limited by your senses, and even a Blu Ray quality 4K stream is ~ 100 Mbps. If you have a half dozen people in your house watching at once, that's 600. There's not even really a case to be made that anyone needs gigabit broadband, let alone 10 gigabit. If you doubt that, provide the use case. I offer this challenge every time something like this comes up, no one can think of one that isn't "well what if we get holodeck technology someday" type of pie in the sky stuff that is far in the future.
You speak of senses when it's intellect that drives most humans. That intellect tells me that mathematically*, thus my rig is faster/slower than yours. The only sense directly affected is time and since my machine can do a cold boot to Windows 8.1 login in under six seconds. Which is much better than the Windows NT 4.01 server boxen, where I could go have some coffee while the RAIDs did their self-checks before boot.
*Math is everything. Everything. One wonders if having too keen a sense of time is a bad thing or not. There are cons.
Disclaimer: I'm about east/northish of Chattanooga, about an hour away, don't come here where I am, fair warning, I'm moving lol.
EPB is as fast and stable as I've ever seen in my 27 year career. One of my clients has a VPN running from Athens (AT&T fiber) to both Knoxville (Charter) and Chattanooga (EPB) - AT&T is flaky, Charter unspeakable, and EPB? That link has never, ever, been down. Inside the building is a wet dream of speed on the gigabit ethernet network. Windows 7/8 updates easily take 1/2 the time (since I bill hourly, it hurts me, but I don't mind, I update/grab stuff myself when down there), the bottleneck is the rest of the internet. Back in 97 in Arizona, we were proud and had pretty big Quake lan parties over four day weekends on the ISP's dual-homed DS3s, this beats it by a couple of miles. I'm impressed.
Now, in reference to the 'Bible Belt', Chattanooga is different from the surrounding counties, pretty cosmopolitan really. Somebody is shooting somebody else every weekend. Chattanooga has a biggish aquarium, good bars downtown, good music-whatever the flavor, developed waterfront by the Tennessee River (which you can go from Knoxville to the Gulf of Mexico on - I've thought about it lol), and Senator Bob Corker was the mayor of, before he increased his pay grade. Nashville, Knoxville, and Memphis are the same, but bigger, all good college towns too.
I will accept the term 'Bible Belt' for any/all of the surrounding counties of these cities - I live in one of them and it's a great place to visit/drive through, speed traps still exist, and they *use* them. Don't speed unless you know their habits and in some places, don't even do that, they'll pull my butt over just the same. If you don't have good-to-excellent cash reserves to buy in, or have a founding-family line name, it's about 50/50 you'll be able to deal with their bullshit and live here. Think of the movie 'Porky's', but with full internet capability.Some are more civilized than others. You have to experience it before you'll believe it - new definitions of WTF will leave you with a very Steven Fry (no, not that one, the Futurama one) look on your face forever...
And yes, they'll be in church every Wednesday night and Sundays.
At the house I have satellite 'broadband' with a 15GB monthly limited data plan... FYI the area surrounding the world's second largest supercomputer sucks ass for connectivity... have some acquaintances bitching about it since college started, 'everything slowed down'.
I suspect the connectivity in the state of Tennessee looks like North Korea's Verizon coverage map.
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