Comcast versus the City of Longmont

[Absentglare]

Here we go with the disingenuous again. Of course a 1Gbs pipe is faster than a 100Mbs pipe, what a silly comparison. How about comparing a 1Gbs fiber pipe against a 1Gbs copper pipe? You know... an apples to apples thing.

Are you seriously suggesting a medium that is subject to EMI, high attenuation, conductor resistance, signal bleed, etc, is going to have the same delay per meter than a medium whose biggest concern is dispersion. Feel free to do the math, or simply ask yourself what medium ISPs use for their backbone.

You are dishonestly shifting the goalposts. Look at what you said :

The fiber network is faster than a copper network regardless of price.

This is completely and utterly false. It is even more ridiculous when you consider than an electromagnetic wave can propagate faster through a copper medium than it can through a fiber optic cable.

A high speed signal that propagates through a long copper medium is subject to the parasitic capacitance, inductance, conductance, and resistance of the transmission line. The effects of these parasitics vary by cable geometry which is why high performance cables are more expensive and why technology like 1000BASE-T (1Gbps over UTP) is restricted to a hundred meters.

Of course, we are not arguing whether fiber can be better than copper under certain circumstances, we are arguing whether fiber is faster simply because it is fiber. It is obviously not. It is laughably not. The propagation delay of the media is a negligible contributor of end-to-end delay, processing delay typically far exceeds the propagation delay.

 

[Absentglare]

Copper refers to the medium the electrons travel over. UTP, coax, shielded pair, etc are all use a copper medium.

I am fully aware that coax can use the metal known as copper, that's irrelevant.

DSL- copper
Cable- coax
Fiber- fiber

In the data communications industry, it is not unusual to refer to UTP as simply "copper," but it would be unusual to say "copper" if one is intending to refer to coax.

For example :

Notice how "Coaxial" is not included under "Copper Systems."

http://contech-solutions.com

Why would someone with a 56k modem bring the entire Internet to a screeching halt? We could discuss the dynamics of multi-link point to point connections, but I figure you already know how silly your comment was. If your comment was just a straw man and not a representation of your technical knowledge, then I apologize for not getting it.

I know the comment was silly, it is a reductio ad absurdum of this statement :

Quiz: How fast can a network go? Answer: Only as fast as its slowest link.

Networks would not function well if they all could only go as fast as their slowest link. An analogy would be that lowering the speed limit on one street would equally lower the speed limits on all other streets. Of course, we have parking lots at 15mph and freeways at 75mph just as we have 56k modems and 10GbE.