Broadband Reports put a post up yesterday about Maine having the slowest Internet speeds in the New England region. I only had dial-up service for the one year I lived in Portland, but in a corner of my brain I was pretty sure I remembered seeing a statistic then about the state having the most fiber optic cabling of any in the country. I ran some Google searches and here’s the closest I found to a similar stat:
“[Maine] has more than 110,000 miles of fiber-optic cable and 100 percent digital phone switching technology in place. Maine leads the country with telecommunications infrastructure…”
Just goes to show that having the right infrastructure doesn’t guarantee high-speed Internet. I wonder how much of that dark fiber (in Maine and elsewhere) might get lit now that TV on the Web will drive more demand.
I see reference to available fiber and internet connection slowness in the mainstream media and I just roll my eyes. The beauty of Blogs is that I can chime in…
Dark fiber is not the cause of slow internet connections. We are not out of bandwidth. Adding more bandwidth is trivial. The true cause of slow internet connections is peering. There are only so many peering points between networks. That’s where the traffic jam is…
Certainly we’re not out of bandwidth, but I wouldn’t say that adding more (or simply managing it better) is trivial. And dark fiber isn’t the cause of slow Internet connections, but active fiber is a good pipe for delivering fast Internet connections. The issue is whether and when fiber is the most cost-effective solution.