Fiber is… here?
Yesterday was a cacophony of noise in my neighborhood as Nashville Electric Service trucks were at pole after pole placing new equipment on the lines and making ready some locations for fiber over the poles. Spools of silver were located at every street.
Not silver like guide wire, silver like fiber optic spaceman silver. Weird square devices were hung on the bottom wires, they looked a little like carabiners in that they appeared there solely to hold other wiring.
There were eight NES trucks that I counted on the way to daycare. All were working near similar spools of spaceman happy string, but there was not a Google Fiber subcontractor in sight.
I got my kiddos dropped off and headed in to work and that’s when I saw the array of Comcast trucks. Fiber was here, but it wasn’t Google Fiber. It was the company I’ve actively been trying to get away from for 15 years and they beat Google to the punch.
Comcast and AT&T won the fiber rollout wars in South Nashville, but the question becomes will that make a lick of difference when a far less hated company manages to roll in?
A lot of people wonder why we need Fiber optic gigabit speeds these days. Playing with 4K streams and seeing the garbage artifacting that seems to be considered acceptable at 25 megabits combined with frame rates that hurt, I’d liken even 1080P tvs image quality to having been run through a blender, chopped up, and the life squeezed out of it.
Then again, perhaps working with an industry that you get to see what video is capable of before it gets compressed into a stream that tosses what it considered extraneous data out to make a target bandwidth which is then hopefully achieved by your digital TV provider but generally ends up looking like blocky garbage if you look closely, I’ve been spoiled.
All of it looks vaguely jaggy to me. Perhaps I can go back to a time before I saw the video fnords until Google Fiber makes it here though ;)
