Running quartz fiber as a national infrastructure is probably not happening in our life time unless the government steps in and does it. The cost to run that much wire would have to be spread out over a large number of companies and even then remote areas probably wouldn’t get it for decades after the coasts and other major cities did. In America there simply isn’t the motivation to run that kind of grid.
Also if your running some internet from the high-end fiberoptics and other sections through lower grade cables the total speed won’t change a great deal.
If a server is on a lower grade connection the amount of time it takes to get from the server to the beginning of your quartz fiber network remains unchanged. So running 100’s of miles of quartz fiber will only result for less than a 10% increase for a server 1000’s of miles away. Bottlenecks galore!
iirc, the U.S. ran on a 5mb/s backbone, and the speeds that are advertised by certain companies (verizon fios, att uverse) are technically from their hub to you.
Hum. After thinking about it, I think I was wrong in my last post.
Actually, the original reason that research in fiber optics began, true, was because of higher bandwidth considerations, and in fact, bandwidth, to my knowledge, had been the primary driver of fiber optics research when telephones dominated telecommunications. This part I’m pretty sure about.
However, for many high-end telecommunications applications today, the propagation speed that limits transmission lines is a HUGE issue, so saying something like “only bandwidth matters, speed can go suck it” is just talking out of my ass.