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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?).
This article was focused on surfing and downloading. I could do a whole other article on latency, working remotely, VPN, etc, with appropriate recommendations.
And if your COMCAST connection is flaky, have you tried complaining? and if they blew you off, did you try complaining to your municipality? COMCAST’s front-line help is as bad as any other, but their mgt. do want happy customers (hmmm, another article here too 8-})
/j
After having Comcast internet for quite a few years and having FIOS now for close to two years…
FIOS has clearly been better at everything. No more cable outages, cable modem not playing right with the router, no more lousy upload speed, etc.
FIOS is the way to go if its available.
Wow, this article fails to mention some of the most important differences between services: Latency and upload speeds.
It’s about much more than just download speeds. Have you ever tried to RDP in to your desktop at home over a cable connection with lots of latency?? No matter how fast the connection is, it just doesn’t work well. I slower DSL connection may work much better. This is one of the great things about FIOS. The latency times are very small. 2-way application work extremely well.
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To me the answer is simply “Yes!” you do want FiOs. Verizon’s FTTH service is far better than anything delivered by any Cable Company period. Fire your cable company the first chance you get.
Lets look at the infrastructure layer first the fiber in your telco closet; un-matched. The migration path for the fiber is endless. For example let say hypothetically that the FiOs network is reaching capacity what will VZ do? Spend another 10 Billion and deploy a a new network? The is answer no, all they have to do is swap out the Network Interface Device (NID) with one that has more capacity or one with a DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) device on board and take a single fiber pair carve up the waves of light. Currently DWDM technology can deliver 400Gb/s on a single fiber strand. That’s equivalent to 160 2.5G/s OC-48’s in your basement. Limitless bandwidth…
No we look at Verizon’s network layer specifically it’s internet capabilities. Globally, Verizon has the most reaching physical network in the world. Remember VZ now owns all of its competitors on the local side of it’s business the old CLEC’s like MFS, Brooks Fiber etc.. VZ picked up the old WorldCom/MCI network which provided Verizon with some very interesting network assets. Like Uunet…the grand-daddy of the internet. When Jeff speaks about “backhaul” to the internet in his article he’s forgetting one important thing; much like Al Gore VZ is the internet. They own and operate the largest internet backbone on earth. So When your FiOs connection jumps onto the internet backbone at your local CO (Central Office) they hand that connection over to themselves. If network capacity becomes an issue go back to step one, increase their own capacity.
Statistical multiplexing is not a bad thing at all and it’s inference in this article might be viewed as a negative. Statistical multiplexing is used on every backbone network in the world it provides link utilization improvement for a more efficient network. This all happens at the switching layer of networks where data is packetized into small cells and sent asynchronously on a first come first served basis across networks.
To me the deficiency or physical limitations of the HFC Hybrid Fiber Coax are reason alone to fire the cable company. With the current network architecture there is no way the cable company can compete in the long run without an overbuild. But that’s a good thing for the consumer.
The evil angle for me is not the love of Verizon or their network, it’s the glass. Having that fiber terminated in my home will allow for me the “consumer” to have access to all of the future services and technologies that being developed by hundreds of companies. Those services will ride that fat-pipe into my basement and ultimately VZ will be reduced to my ISP. I will be able to buy content/services that I want when I want.