You’re thinking that if decent upstream speeds were offered on ordinary FTTH then that might threaten ISPs’ profits because they need to sell leased line type ethernet services at a high price and make sure businesses are not going to settle for cheaper FTTH instead ? - Because ordinary FTTH’s upstream won’t be good enough.
I don’t mind the prices so much. Business oriented services will have a decent SLA too possibly, and that costs money to provide, and decent upstream requires them not to oversell network capacity especially because I presume that business users won’t put up with not getting the speeds they are paying for, in both directions, so the ISP has to make sure they’re not going to be running a congested network. I would like to have the choice though. I would like to see more high capacity quality links, or ones that are potentially so, which are throttled maybe, to allow ISPs to sell an alternative cheaper product.
Once fibre has been laid and blown, isn’t that the end of the cost apart from the cost of providing core bandwidth and transit per Mbps per as required, in order to keep congestion at bay. More bandwidth means more money on switches, more user traffic means higher payments to wholesale carriers and transit providers for traffic and for bandwidth ? If the user wants more upstream then with shared things like GPON that means a bigger slide of the cake and so fewer customers served, so more expensive; seems that that is bad news, could be very restrictive in the future with new unforeseen use cases and new applications arising. That makes me nervous about things like GPON - although I know very little about it. It seems to me it doesn’t have a future-proofing scalable nature to it - is that correct ?
This whole cloud nonsense gives me a queasy feeling, because what do you do when there is a network outage ? Outages are never going to go away. Networks getting more reliable, such as getting rid of DSL and copper, is not the whole story, as there will still be diggers, planned maintenance going wrong, human error cock ups, hardware failures, software bugs and bad software updates. So moving functions to be located in cloud services introduces a new dependency. And cloud is surely all about upstream, so crappy upstream speeds for FTTH are going to mean that businesses are more able to use certain types of cloud services than home users, if the business users have better internet access links?