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In the beginning, DSL was a path out of slow dial-up speeds, then the cable companies developed HFC systems using DOCSIS for Internet. Now, Verizon claims FiOS is the fastest Internet you’ll ever need. You gotta admit, these guys are great with the acronyms, but what do they mean? And how much speed do you really need?
Though modern cable systems send their signals on fiber as far as each neighborhood, they use the older coax for the “last-mile” to each home. This is called a “hybrid-fiber-coax” or “HFC” system. On these systems, cable companies use “DOCSIS” standards to convert one (or more) of their 100+ TV channels to a 30-40Mb/s shared Internet connection, which is then shared by as many as 250 homes.
With FiOS, Verizon took a simpler but more expensive approach. Rather than stopping at the neighborhood loop, Verizon ran a fiber strand to every grouping of 2-3 homes. This provides them with much higher bandwidth and, at first glance, removes the need for shared Internet.
However, FiOS shares one limitation with its older cousin DSL. DSL was the phone company’s first attempt to provide high-speed Internet. It provided a (relatively) high-speed dedicated connection to the phone company’s central office, and at the time, phone companies ran memorable ads about cable users complaining to their neighbors about tying up the net. However, what they didn’t tell you is that the phone companies did some Internet connection-sharing of their own. Their central office contained a switch which connected all the DSL users to a single “back-haul” connection to the Internet. The capacity of the back-haul was significantly less than the sum of the capacity of all the user connections. In fact, the technical name of the switch was a “statistical multiplexer” because it dolled out limited back-haul capacity to satisfy user requests as best it could, just as the cable solution tries to provide balanced access to the limited local loop.
FiOS employs the same “statistical multiplexer” technology, doling out limited back-haul bandwidth to hundreds of users. Thus, it’s hard to say whether FiOS seems better because it has more bandwidth, or because Verizon’s penetration in a typical town is less than 30-percent, leaving much of their capacity underutilized for now.
How does this translate to surfing speed? Well, simple web-surfing rarely requires more than 2Mb/s of bandwidth (the speed of a good DSL connection or a first generation cable modem or wireless network). Games don’t often require much more (though games also require low-latency, which is another story).
Any speed above the first few Mb/s may be unnoticeable to you unless you are downloading or streaming. Both cable and FiOS provide ample speed for downloading software or streaming audio and MP3 files. In fact, it’s likely that your download speeds for these sort of files are limited by the source rather than your connection. For example, if iTunes or Adobe won’t permit an individual download to use more than 1Mb/s of their capacity, the rest of your 5Mb/s (or 15Mb/s) connection will go unused.
When does really high speed matter? In a word: Video. We all want larger, higher-resolution pictures when we stream, and really fast downloads of our favorite TV shows and movies. Unfortunately, making these wishes a reality requires more than the fastest FiOS you can buy. It requires massive servers that can simultaneously provide thousands of streams of high-speed content, and an Internet infrastructure that can provide sufficient bandwidth for all those simultaneous streams. Video support will be lacking until the entire Internet infrastructure can easily support hundreds of thousands of users downloading at speeds in excess of 1Gb/s. 1Gb/s would allow you to download an hour of regular video in a minute, or an hour of HD video in 5-10 minutes (remember when it took that long to download a song?).
I’d much rather have the “bottleneck” at their central locations than all over the country so they have less places to upgrade to give more bandwidth to everyone.
Second they claim to not re-compress the video on FIOS TV as they send it to their subscribers, unlike what everyone else is doing.
Last they do not have a monthly upload / download cap on their internet connections so you are free to enjoy those movie download services offered by Sony, Netflix, etc. without having to worry about being disconnected.
Too bad I can’t get it here :(
A few minor corrections and updates to this article. First, it talks about “converting one of their 100+ TV channels” to a DOCSIS channel. Not quite. A cable HFC system is broken into 6 MHz channels. One of these channels will fit 1 DOCSIS channel (30 - 40 Mbps), one analog television channel, or around 10 to 12 digital channels. Digital transmission is more efficient than analog (which is why analog over-the-air broadcasts are being eliminated in 2009).
Also, depending on the cable operator, there can actually be up to 1000 people sharing a DOCSIS channel (250 is specified in the artible), though HFC plant upgrades are rapidly reducing this number.
Finally, cable operators are currently planning an upgrade to a new DOCSIS version called DOCSIS 3.0. DOCSIS 3.0 allows them to combine multiple (initially 4 channels, more in future DOCSIS channels to provide connections of 100 Mbps or more to each subscriber. So cable operators will soon be able to offer far faster speeds than those offered today.
Thanks for that savvy response, now I understand why.
thanks
I don’t have FiOs so this is based off of my knowledge of the industry.
It is technically possible to have a PCI/PCIe interface card that the FiOs fiber terminates into, but i doubt we’ll ever see it.
Why?:
1. Services: There’s more than just Internet access coming through that fiber. Video and Phone signal needs to be taken out of the light and sent to other devices.
2. Control of the signal: The reason FiOs/cable/satellite all have set top boxes is so they can control the content/service that you receive. In the 80s/90s getting a simple filter would unscramble HBO for you. Older Cable modems are hacked into give higher bandwidths, The satellite cards used to be able to be reprogrammed to allow free service. Having that box in our house gives them the ability to mitigate a lot of the risk of theft.
3. Support: It provides a clear line between them and you. If you have an internal card in your computer and down the road, you run into a problem with accessing the Internet, it gets blurry as to where the problem really is. Did you install a program, or contract a virus that is diminishing the performance, or is there a problem with the interface card, or is it a service problem? With a separate box, at an absolute worst case scenario, a tech can come out to your house, plug in a laptop to the box and ensure there is nothing wrong, or identify and troubleshoot if there is a problem with the service.
With the interface card they’d have to pay a more expensive tech to troubleshoot through your computer, and that would probably come after many frustrating support calls. People are a lot more expensive to have than putting that box at your house.
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If you do any amount of P2P work, FiOS kills Comcast and the other cable providers. No upload/download limits and no P2P throttling. I love the service, had for several years now.
Verizon’s Tech Support sucks - limited hours, ignorant support personnel, and getting the right Dept. can be a NIGHTMARE. And what is up with that GODAWFUL Telephone Menu Robot - hire some folks to answer the phone for God’s sake! You’re a PHONE COMPANY, FIRST AND FOREMOST (Remember Bell Atlantic?)
And I’m about sick and tired of having to show their service personnel how to make a decent cable crimp (no kidding!) But once the service is up and running properly, it’s a doddle. And my download speeds for snagging music, movies and such is tremendous.
Once it’s right, you’re gold. getting it right HAS been problem…
-RW-