While others across the industry battle it out over 10-gig claims, Google Fiber is looking to go bigger, plotting the rollout of a symmetrical 20-gig service for select residential and business cus | The service will use Nokia's 25G-PON gear and initially be available later this year as an invite-only product.
Having a connection that’s not even close to saturated (or backbone for that matter) means lower latency in general. But it also means future proofing and timely issues resolution as you catch problems early on.
Future proofing an Internet line doesn’t make much sense to me. If a higher speed plan is available, I’d just upgrade my plan if the need arises, save money in the meantime.
Flip it around and look from the ISP’s point of view. Once fiber is connected to a house, there are few good reasons to use anything else. Whomever is the first to deploy it wins.
Now look at it from a monopoly ISP’s point of view. You’re providing 100Mbps service on some form of copper wire, and you’re quite comfortable leaving things like that. No reason to invest in new equipment beyond regular maintenance cycles. If some outside company tries to start deploying fiber, and if they start to make inroads, you’re going to have to (gasp) spend hundreds of millions on capital outlays to compete with them. Better to spend a few million making sure the city never allows them in.
That too. To ISP it pays off to future-proof to a degree. More to the point, it’s easier to aggregate high bandwidth users since no one will be using full connection speed all the time, it’s simply impossible. So with 100Gbps they can give 25Gbps service to a lot more people than 4. Closer to 40 or so. Good marketing, test and prepare for future at a decent investment now. It’s how things should be.