4 Terabit Internet?! Fiber Company Tour!

you basically have four terabits of connectivity that you can go on a single pair of fiber today is a special one folks because utopia fiber has asked if they could sponsor this video by giving us a tour of what it is like inside the secret facilities of a cutting edge fiber internet company now notice i didn't say isp or internet service provider because utopia isn't so what are they they are a non-profit but government-owned entity backed by revenue bonds which are paid off by subscriber fees and dues so taxpayers well taxpayers pay nothing utopia then takes this fancy new network and leases it out to isps that can then offer service to end users like me and you this means a few things number one you get a really modern network all residential customers can get up to 10 gigabit which is insane and businesses can get up to a hundred gigabit number two that creates competition which makes pricing extremely affordable because you have a bunch of different isps on utopia's network and then number three utopia has development in a lot of rural and less affluent areas which big profit driven telecoms frequently forget so i sat down with roger timmerman ceo of utopia fiber to talk about how fiber gets from a fiber hut which we'll talk about in a minute to your house this is a big old cable is that what you consider it's pretty firm yep it's it's pretty tough i mean you got to do some real damage to break this thing but most of this is just to make it strong but in the middle of this thing you'll see we got these little fiber strands this one has 432 individual fiber strands wow just in that one cable and that can carry internet to 432 customers or more than that yeah no this is designed to go out into a neighborhood and connect to those houses so we plan for one of these per house um with some spares and what's the theoretical bandwidth per individual strand so there really is no limit i mean that's the cool thing about the fiber is you know off the shelf stuff you could go do terabits per second you know ridiculous speeds um but even in lab environments they they continue to set record after record and that's not what's anything special that's the same fiber that we installed every home of business so it's comprised of glass primarily right yeah you don't really see it here um it looks more like something like this that's down inside of it it's hard to see it's it's smaller than a human hair and so it's just this really fine little piece of glass and light goes over that and then they've got to protect it so that's why you see all these different colors that's just the plastic protecting you know so that you can't break it and mess it up short and how rigid is the glass because obviously the thinner something gets the easier it is to bend it's very flexible in fact in some ways it's too flexible and that's why you have all this other stuff to make sure it doesn't get broken so as we come out of one of our facilities you might have a whole bunch of these cables with thousands of fiber strands coming out but but really for thousands you only need you know four or five of these cables coming out and then as that goes out in the neighborhood it'll break out into smaller cables with maybe 96 count or 24 count as we go and kind of you know spread across the city so let's talk about how we actually splice these cables together okay so we've got a spool here this thing's pretty heavy how much fiber is in this spool so this this is just for testing there's no protection on there but the glass that goes around this there's about 10 miles of of glass strand right there okay and how fast does it travel from one end to the other it's the speed of light so we're talking really really fast [Music] it's it's a slightly slower than the speed of light okay and why is that um well normally we measure speed of light in a vacuum and this is in glass and so glass is more dense it slows it down just a little bit but just the fact that we're talking about the speed of the speed of light at all it's uh we're super fast compared to anything else out there okay so let's say i'm i don't know getting fiber deployed in my neighborhood or even specifically at my home how do you stick two fiber cables together it's not like copper you can't just splice them together right yeah it's a little tricky you know as you actually pull the strands out of these cables and we need to make a connection it's not like you can just plug those into each other and so there's special tools called a fiber splicer like this where you can put those fiber strands and it lines them up and it melts them together so and it puts a little protection around them and makes it nice and clean and we gotta strip that off and then you gotta cut them so they have a perfectly 90 degree angle on the end and then we put them in here and then the machine lines them up scoots them right next to each other and there's an arc that an electrical arc that melts it and then you pull it out of there and suddenly it's a contiguous piece of glass that's awesome what happens if it's off angle is a signal not as good it errors out and says don't even do this over again or in a lot of cases it doesn't even do it it'll it'll tell you there's a problem before it tries very cool this tool certainly comes in handy when running fiber to the inside of a home which i got to go check out in a new housing development supported by utopia technicians tape some pulling line to a heavily insulated single fiber wire and fished it through conduit that ran from the curbside to the outside of the home's garage a hole was then drilled to bring the cable inside the garage and then it was fastened every few inches along the top of the ceiling to a point where it could enter the house into a utility room crawl space now one end was terminated and inserted into a network switch to provide the home fiber customers with a network connection and on the other end back of the curb it needed to be sliced to the grid inside the curbs utility box is something called a splice enclosure which is basically just a big weather sealed box to keep water and dirt out now inside that box is a splice tray which has incoming fiber wires that have been neatly organized for technicians to properly terminate for new customers the installer then stripped the wire coming from the house of its jacket cleaned the fiber itself and then cut it so that it could be nicely terminated and then use that awesome machine roger talked about to splice the fibers together once completed the fiber was placed into the tray wrapped up and sealed once more so that it could be placed into the ground never to see the light of day ever again well at least until the next neighbor signs up for utopia too okay so where does the fiber from your house go that'd be a fiber hut and utopia has allowed me and all of you to take a look at one of these seldom-seen utility rooms that help bring internet to the masses there's a lot of stuff in here so let's get a breakdown of kind of what each piece of gear does well you'll notice it's pretty cool in here really kind of feels great yeah we just hang out here it's a lot better than outside yeah uh so we got to keep all this equipment to temperature so it stays up and operates well uh we also need to make sure it keeps running if power goes out so this is a whole bunch of really big batteries all connected up so that if the power goes out everything in here keeps running uh outside there's a really big generator so it's extended generator kicks in and keeps everything up and running even if the batteries are depleted so we showed you some cables that go out into the neighborhoods and separate out into the homes well here we can see those big cables coming in there's not a lot of them but inside each one of those you may have hundreds of fiber strands those come into the fiber hut and go into those racks over there where we get every individual connection and plug those into the switches so each one of these is a fiber going out to a house but that home may not have signed up or not so if you've signed up for services then we'll have connected that and then that fiber connection comes over here and plugs into one of these switches so most of these are one gig connections we've got some 10 gig connections here that stuff comes over to the big guy and the big guys all hundred gig connections and that's where we get into connecting cities to cities and our really big capacity connections across the state this is probably one of the coolest things in here this is one of the systems that actually changes the color of light or the frequency of light and and puts them all in the same fiber so our backbone uses this sort of stuff you got a whole bunch of different ports and each one of those ports represents a different color and so you can have 40 different connections that are you know 100 gigabits each that all line up together and go on to the same glass and then on the other end there's another one of these and it breaks all those connections back out so you basically have four terabits of connectivity that you can go on a single pair of fiber it's a lot of capacity crazy crazy so this is definitely different than a lot of other fiber networks where there literally is a fiber for every single home and business in the community a lot of other fiber networks out there they go through splitters and they kind of share those connections there's not nearly as much fiber coming into these facilities there's some pros and cons you know obviously there's more fiber there's more of this type of gear in here than on a g-pawn network but we also benefit that everybody literally gets their own dedicated connection off of these switches it doesn't matter what your neighbor's doing you can max that connection out 24 7. it's always there and available for you sure that surely comes at a greater expense to you guys right um a little bit it's not really what as much as difference as you think the equipment is is actually less expensive to do it this way because the entire world uses ethernet whereas jeep on is kind of a niche in just fiber providers out there and so we save a lot of money on the equipment and have actually greater capabilities there because it's the same stuff used in data centers and other purposes but there's more fiber so there's a lot more splicing bigger cables going out into the neighborhoods there's a little bit more expense in materials and cabling okay so we now understand how fiber gets from somewhere like my house to a fiber hut but then where does it go from there so in a fiber hut those are all connected to each other but we also have fiber routes into the major data centers and carrier hotels and what that is is it's a big facility kind of like you see in these movies with lots of racks and blinking lights and that's where everybody connects with each other but there's a few of them in utah that have the major backbone fiber routes that go across the country to the other major cities and so there's really three in salt lake city that pretty much all internet traffic through utah and even some of the adjacent states goes through those facilities so what happens is you get a connection from us from the fiber hut to your service provider but those service providers have equipment in these data centers and they can go and pick from different companies to get connectivity on those backbone routes but then there's also this really cool thing called the salt lake internet exchange and in those data centers people can connect directly to each other and so rather than have go out on the backbone of the internet sometimes you might think you are but you're like wow this is really good latency and this is really good speeds and you may actually be staying the entire time on the local networks and never hitting the internet but what happens is there's this routing that takes place that makes sure that it takes the most efficient route well this web page here shows us the salt lake internet exchange and the participants they've got utopia fiber on there but also many of the data center the data centers and the service providers uh that participate on the network are on here and a lot of that aren't so yeah like twitch is on here cloudflare is a big one yep google fiber utah education network and so you'd be at home you know and you pull up something on you know from the school system and that stuff comes you really really fast because it doesn't actually go across the internet but it works just like it does just super super fast so this is a really cool way so a lot of your traffic may not actually come from the internet it comes through these peerings and there's purines that happen in all of these places all over the country and it saves money but it makes things work a lot better and then you'll see that big guys like facebook and google they actually go out there and build data centers regionally and connect into these peering exchanges so that they can get to the customers or the eyeball networks a lot better and faster than they would if they just had a location in the west or east so that's kind of how it works everybody connects as much as they can and then your connection goes the best possible route and based on what your provider has done from a peering perspective there's one really neat part of the tour left you might have experienced from past internet service providers i know i have and they'll remain nameless that they have no idea whether their customer's internet connection is down or not and where the problem is located utopia works differently all right so this is a big place what do we got here so this is our network operations center this is where we make sure the network is up and running all the time so 24 7 we've got people making sure that service is running great that there aren't any problems or fiber cuts or anything like that and sometimes that happens and we know about it immediately and we can send technicians out to fix them we've got a whole bunch of different really cool graphs and charts and red boxes and things that tell us what's going on in the network you got some video feeds over here there's different video there's not just for fun oh yeah that was my guess okay there's a lot of downtime in here but uh you know we gotta make sure the services that people are using uh are up and running and working properly so we've got a lot of different video options on the network uh but also we've got security needs and just mostly the reliability of network is the primary task that they have here excellent this has all been super cool but why should you care about fiber especially if you don't live in an area with utopia service well i've been a utopia customer for a few weeks now so that i could talk about that very topic so let's do a speed test here wow using single gigabit fiber has been amazing because while i get pretty fast network download speeds at home via cable upload speeds are always abysmal and unreliable utopia's active ethernet network promises symmetrical speeds and they deliver because my ping back to my isp is insanely low we're talking like sub 1 millisecond i find myself performing better in online multiplayer matches because i'm typically chosen as the host and i'm shaving off quite literally dozens of milliseconds in ping time giving me a sometimes unfair real world gaming advantage now when it comes to uploading youtube videos that used to take a couple hours but now i'm able to upload this 22 gig video in about four minutes holy smokes the problem is and this sounds really spoiled i'm running into some issues that come with having gigabit ethernet networking i often feel that i'm hitting the limitation of how fast providers can even feed me internet data period like when i run a fast.com speed test i top out in the mid 700 megabits per second of download speed so i wanted to take this a step further and see if there were any network services that i could use with frequency that take advantage of a full untamed 10 gigabit ethernet connection remember because utopia has one fiber optic cable for every customer all i had to do was give them a call and they swapped me out from a single gigabit switch in my local fiber hut to a 10 gigabit switch and then on my side i needed to swap out my transceiver i had in my office from a single gig to 10 gig transceiver and that's well that was about it so let's run the test with our new 10 gigabit fiber network and holy crap we're getting about 7 000 megabits per second in each direction and what i've discovered is that this number varies drastically between which speed test server is selected almost none of them can fully saturate my 10 gig connection think about it 7 000 megabits is about 875 megabytes per second this means that i can upload my 22 gigabyte video in about 25 seconds so let's try it man it's a little faster but not much this cool network activity widget i have shows that i'm peaking at about 1200 megabits per second that's a youtube limitation not a snazzy labs limitation i quite honestly can't upload fast enough okay so let's try downloading a movie from the tv app on mac os uh oh that's wow okay something else then on google drive i can only download at 35 megabytes per second which is only 280 megabits per second ironically or perhaps not ironically the only place i can really stretch my legs with this 10 gig connection is well to download files through peer-to-peer sharing or bittorrent illegal ones of course but even then i'm lucky to get around three to four gigabits of total throughput so that brings us to the question is 10 gigabit necessary for normal people well today i'd say no but people said that about gigabit many years ago and look where we are today what's cool about utopia's network is that the infrastructure is such that it has the ability to easily expand once faster network speeds become needed and become the norm heck residential 10 gig is already available from utopia for just about 200 per month from most of their isps that's insane that's less than what i pay for crappy cable and if you only need single gigabit like me and almost everyone else in the rest of the world most utopia isps charge just 55 a month in my opinion utopia is proof that the internet should exist as a utility i mean just think about it the speeds are unparalleled the network thanks to it being not for profit is well maintained and robust and only continues to get better pricing thanks to many isps is extremely great the network itself is expanding into cities and neighborhoods that have been neglected by for-profit telecoms for decades and it makes enough money from subscriber dues to be self-sustaining for decades yet to come it's freaking awesome and it's my hope that more municipalities in more states will attempt to emulate what utopia has done because they're a nationwide leader for a reason and are changing the way we do internet well folks if you enjoyed this video please give it a like if you didn't that other button seems to work okay too get subscribed for more awesome videos like this one but most importantly and as always stay snazzy see you later folks

Channel: Snazzy Labs

Views: 943,865

Rating: 4.9388394 out of 5

Keywords: snazzy labs, quinn nelson, snazzyq, fiber, fiber internet, fastest internet, isp, data center, fiber technology, cable, google fiber, utopia, 10gig, 10gigabit, 10 gigabit, gigabit, 10 gbe, gbe, router, technology, internet, how does the internet work, how do isps work, tour, learning, diy, copper, ethernet, cat7, cat7a, cat6a, rj45, ethernet cable, fiber cable, sfp, server, server room

Id: 2e9DNwInTE4

Length: 18min 48sec (1128 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020