How Fiber Will Speed Up America’s Internet

The US Gov in the late 1980s sought to make the US the worlds most fiber connected country in the world and passed laws in 1992 giving about 400 Billion dollars to the telecoms to build fiber networks to build the entire country a vast network of fiber capable of 10Gb/s+ speeds for every person within 10 years. The companies pocketed almost all of it and said they couldn't actually do it afterwards. So the next time you see some company shilling for money from tax payers over fiber. Remember they were supposed to have 100% fiber internet at gigabit plus speeds by the early-mid 2000s, 20 years ago now. Their complete and utter lack of proper investment in their networks at the rates they charge is such an absurd sum of money that they could more than pay for that right now. Unfortunately the MO right now for these publicly traded companies is most profit for least money spent so until the government sets them a deadline of suspension of license to operate within the US within say 10 years, they will never do it for another 30-40 years. I am personally a person who almost always favors the private sector, but this model of operation has desperately failed the citizens of the USA. I am strongly of the opinion the US Gov should just build it all out and then rent it to the ISPs while capping how much profit they can make off their customers with flat fees. Basically the infrastructure should be nationalized until the ISPs renting fees have paid off the original costs of construction. Then they can purchase the old infrastructure/equipment for legacy systems while the gov builds out/upgrades for the next generation. An alternative to this is that the US Gov could instead just start flinging money at new start up locally based ISPs to start a pricing war with the larger ones. This would cost the tax payer less than footing the entire bill all over again. And when they cry wolf about why they are getting absolutely bent over by the government, should ask them why they didn't just honor their half of the deal couple decades prior... Its one thing in a long long list of BS things that are plaguing this country compared to many other in the first world. Corruption.

I like how they report on fiber as if it's new and not half a century old. It's pretty embarrassing that the US spent all the money to develop all these technologies and then failed to actually deploy them in a reasonable time span

This should have been largely completed in the early 2000s. I got my tech cert and they never implemented fiber, they dragged it for decades since and they still artificially slowing speeds on current fiber networks.

Watching this makes me feel like I've been transported back in time 20 years

As a Telecommunications worker for many years I can tell you it's criminal how much money these companies make and how little they are willing to pay for contracts to the actual builders. Telecommunications workers desperately need to unionize if they ever wish to achieve the success the lineman have.

Here in NZ our government rolled out Fibre nationally and we went from having one of the worst internet speeds & prices to some of the best in the world.

Here in Australia the government built a "state of the art" broadband network using existing 50 year old copper cabling which was delayed many years, over budget billions of dollars and obsolete before it was even started.

Yes early adoption of cable tv has played a key role in lagging fiber-to-the-home adoption in the US, BUT the main reason is simply GREED. The writing has been on the wall for a long time now for coax, but providers and their overlords are milking out traditional last mile coax cable till the very last drop to maximize profits and postpone capital expenditure on upgrades, that is all.

We’re so behind on this in USA. Should’ve made it available to everyone a decade ago.

Got AT&T Fiber last year and its been amazing. Not ONE drop or service interruption the entire year. Haven't had to touch the modem once. It just works. I really hope they build out the infrastructure for everyone to get on fiber over the old cable/DSL systems. I have 1gig and that's more than enough for me but I'm seeing ISPs releasing 5/10gig lines for home users, crazy.

I can guarantee that the issues with fibre roll out in the US is down to monopolies. Companies have customers by the balls and nothing is going to change that. The limited roll out of Google fibre proved that

I've had fiber for around 3 years now, and we were lucky to have been covered by fiber before the pandemic. We started at 25mbps upload and download. Thanks to competition between ISPs here in the Philippines, my current speed is now at 300mbps upload and download for around $40 per month, and that is bundled with TV and a landline phone. Also very happy to be covered by 5G which gives me around 200mbps download speed during the rare instances we get an internet outage.

It's embarrassing how bad the internet service is in the US.

The reason why they can't get fiberoptic installers is because they aren't willing to pay for it. They are only paying $18-20 an hour "last mile" home installers and $20-25 for infrastructure installers. This is not competitive pay for wire workers, electricians which do similar pulling wires and plugging cables in a last mile installation and running cables on poles earn double that.

Just started my telecommunications job. It’s awesome seeing people’s reaction to seeing us install fiber.

Here in Singapore, we’ve had fibre since like the 2010s. Almost everyone here uses fibre. It helps that the fibre optic cables were laid by the Gov, unlike the US where the telco is in charge of laying the fibre optic cables.

"With fiber optic internet you can get speeds up to 2 Gbps". Meanwhile in sweden we've had 10 Gbps available for private households with fiber connection since 2018.

Have Verizon FIOS fiber in NYC and it's the best internet service I've ever used. Extremely fast and extremely reliable. Super low ping and hardly any packet loss ever.

I have fiber but it didn't work like advertised. It turned out that the box that was connected to the fiber was installed incorrectly. But after it was done again I now have clean, stable, super fast internet. Great for increasing my influence over this world.

A little overlooked fiber revolution that's happening right now, thanks a lot for this video. Very well delivered 🙂