When Watson was CEO of IBM he said he saw a market for about 5-6 computers... worldwide.Varmintmist wrote: ↑Mon May 19, 2025 5:04 amA lot of people have said that all cable will be gone for longer than I worked in the industry. I have a book from a college class that states that no home will ever need more than 9600 baud...... I heard many times that copper would never run more than 56K..... Well when I got out, there was 60M bonded copper internet service over 2 copper pair. Copper is expensive so they are getting away from it, mainly because higher ups have no idea how to make signal pass over copper and if you dont do main on it for 15 years because you dont understand it and dont care about your customers its even more expensive. When you train HR about DEI hires and dont train techs on cable maintenance, its even more expensive. There are literally 2, repeat 2 people on the east coast that work on lead cable. Who cares? Well the hospital that is fed off it kind of cared when it went on its butt..... But fiber/cell/sat will replace it.... in a few years, maybe. POTS is done. The day the telcos are no longer required to pour money in to it because the govt tells them they are the provider of last resort, its gone.CPJ 2.0 wrote: ↑Wed May 14, 2025 9:29 pm Hell my iPhone 10 can send messages over satellite.
Any cable (cooper or fiber) based communications will be gone by the time my future grandkids are around.
The AT&T buildings I used to service are aging. Aging….everything. From the windows to the walls, plumbing, electrical, HVAC. All stuff that’s not cheap to maintain. With folks ditching land line phones (who has those) and internet, I don’t look for them to be around long.
Cable installations aren’t cheap to maintain, nor is it easy to replace the gray beards who know where to hit the equipment with a hammer to get it to work.
As with copper, what they are doing with fiber is the same. When I started fiber was kind of new and it could only do X. Then someone came up with a mux, and it could do X-28th. And so on and so on and when I left the amount of info that could go over one fiber is incredible. Fiber is cheap. Dirt cheap. The main cost is to hang it. Once its up and one signal goes over it, its paid for.
People are ditching landline internet, to a point. They 5g you pick up at a cell works well, not as well as a FO and the towers are served by FO so thats not going away. THe FO that is going to homes is real cheap and real cool tech. Its one FO that is broken down to serve 130 customers, and it works.
Sat has lag, up, AND down. Downloads, sure. Messages, sure. I will be interested to see what will happen if they get a bunch of customers on a sat at one time. My father was one of the first people to have a cell phone. He was told that he would NEVER get a busy. Within a year he couldnt get through.
So in a nutshell, every time I hear how XXX is great and will make everything else go away I think about the 30 times that someone else looked at the "old" tech and rethought it and made ti cost effective again.
Ken Olsen, of Digital Equipment Corporation, said there would never be a market for computers at home.
People with digital crystal balls abound and all of them are pretty freaking cloudy. I don't deal in forecasts or predictions. I work with with facts, science and developing technology and use them to plan the future. People like you talk about all the limitations. People like me devote every moment of our professional lives to breaking them. The biggest compliment my boss ever paid me, and the reason I have the job (career) I do, was "Your dictionary does not have the page with the word NO in it? Correct, the answer is it doesn't. My interpretation of that sound is I'm dealing with the wrong person.
Anyway your information WAS correct, about 10 or more years ago. Starlink latency is about 25-60 milliseconds which rivals hybrid cable/fiber networks and is good enough to even make conversations work (tough one), and they are working really hard to get it under 20 which for most applications is MORE than enough. I could get into a WHOLE white paper on asymmetrical networking here to explain why all this works but I won't.
Fiber optics are not going away, the electronics get better every day and faster lasers and segmenting the spectrum into specific light waves make the existing fiber resources be able to carry more and more of a load, not faster, just more payload on a strand. And theoretically there is no upper end to that technology. BUT the world is comprised of hybrid networks and there is no escaping that. There are places on earth fiber will not get to any time soon and how do you communicate with a self driven car in the middle of the Mojave desert (I don't need an answer, that has already been addressed, it's a 8-10 year old discussion). Three years ago I was engaged in a discussion on how to achieve a Tb of data exchange from every single vehicle on the road. Again, a 3 year discussion, we routinely do massive data transmissions to every vehicle on the road today and most owners have no clue.
The reason we are not farther along is not network or technology or capabilities, it's lawyers and regulatory agencies all over the world full of people appointed by their cousins and without a clue as to what is available or possible.
