It is taken as a fact that there are thousands of miles of dark fiber in the ground, and that the only time the wiring needs to be updated is the last 10 feet to the house.  There is another problem though, as the dark fiber gets turned on, the data passing through the aging routers expands beyond what they were designed to cope with.  Ars Technica looks at the current problems; from Moore’s Law as it relates to the price of routers, the speed of RAM, and the solution proposed long ago that might have avoid or at least delayed the current problems.



Also, check out the newest look at Daniel Pohl’s work on ray tracing. This may be the last update we hear from him, and it covers a lot of ground.  Check it out.

“Thanks to the virtually infinite bandwidth of fiber—or rather, the empty tubes that can hold multi-fiber cables—the Internet has continued to get faster for almost four decades, with congestion only proving a temporary condition. But now, it’s again uncertain if the routers that sit at the ends of these fibers will be able to keep up with the growth of the Internet.”

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