i getting a second fiber to the home connection (iceland)

sok most of us are relieved to not live in iceland.

 

I can't pay enough money to get fiber at my house.
But my country isn't bankrupt...yet!

 

Europe called. They want their money back.

 

argor, on behalf of the western world, you're welcome

But seriously, I've been to Iceland once. It looked like the surface of the moon

 

Ild love to visit iceland or even live for a couple of years but OTOH the rest of my life?, I think Ill choose the states thank you very much

 

Well I for one am nothing but jealous after fighting with Comcast here in the states for over a month trying to get a 50/7MB/s connection. Gave up yesterday and got their 20/4MB/s connect as I get the same speeds with both plans yet one is half the price.

I check the AT&T site every day to see if they're available in my area yet, I am flush with jealousy at your connection.

 

Depends where you are. Where my father lives you can get 150 symmetric and they are rolling out 200 and 250 symmetric. Basically, the EPB (electric power board) realized they wanted to go to smart meters and so needed to connect them to a network and the cost of installing fiber everywhere for that was the same as anything else so they did and started offering internet, TV, and telecom services. About every 6 months or so, they up the maximum bandwidth connection another 50 mb/s as they get more comfortable with the network and infrastructure. With the 250 Mb/s service they'll be supporting >350 Mb/s per home between IP and IPTV service (upwards of 6 streams at up to ~20 mb/s per stream).

 

Where's that? If that's in the US then call me boondoggled, that's one company that is kicking ass.

 

Chattanooga, TN, USA.

http://epbfi.com/internet/

And I'm off, looks like they took off the brakes and are offering 1 Gb/s symmetrical now too!

Scary part is I know for a fact there is enough head end bandwidth to support that in the area too. Through the weird particulars of right of way, Chattanooga has a lot of the telco backends running through it (aka it used to be the major railway hub of the SE USA and a lot of the fiber backbones ended up leasing right of way from the railroads. Which isn't surprising considering for backbones you need uninterrupted RoW.)

They actually started off 2+ years ago. Being the local power company, they had a bit of an advantage in that they already had right of ways to every building/house/etc in the area. So anywhere there is a power line, they are also installing fiber. And being the power utility, they also have access to power everywhere too! It was quite a smart play on their part. They needed to go to smart meters, and really the costs of 1 fiber vs 100 is pretty small since almost all the costs are in just installing the cable. Its apparently already more than paid for itself. The only thing I find shocking is that more power companies haven't done it. They all have the RoW infrastructure to do it and they are all moving to smart meters... The EPB did get sued by the cable operators at the beginning but that got dismisses with prejudice immediately.

EPB did have some built in advantages being effectively home to Gore for many years as well as a congressional representative that was supportive of technology in power communications. Combined with being home to TVA, its probably gotten more than its fair share of US Gov grants.

Oh and on a more political note, Chattanooga is now also one of the roll out cities for new network speeds by Comcast(cable) and ATT(bellsouth/DSL). Apparently having competition actually works.

 

That's some decent speeds there although pricing seems a bit on the high side. Although to be fair the only 100 Mbps connection price I have to compare it to is from Japan where it was about 60-70 USD for 100 mpbs up/100 mbps down.

And, dang, 350 USD for 1 Gbps.

Regards,
SB

 

I'm currently getting 40M/10M for about £20 a month, and I'm out in the back end of nowhere in Northern Ireland.

 

The 1 Gbps is really kinda just because they can thing. They've freely admitted that they have no idea how to realistically price a 1 Gbps connection.

Their pricing is generally competitive with other offerings in the states and they've been doubling bandwidth about every 6-9 months at the same price point. I know a couple people who have the 100 and 150 Mbps connections and its funny, most of the speedtest sites cannot sustain that level of bandwidth, they have to open 3-4 different speed tests to different sites to max out the link.

They've apparently already gotten several takers for the 1 Gbps connections though most of those are radiologists who are using them to do readings and consultings from home. Sure beats driving into the hospital at 3 in the morning to spend 15-25 minutes reading a scan.

Another thing of note is that they are doing almost no filtering of the content currently which is resulting in extremely low latencies (almost speed of light).

Apparently their network architecture is current 14 fiber loops are increasing radii each with a minimum of 10 Gbps with several sets of dark fiber in each loop for future capacity increases. Along each loop they have multiple concentrator points each of which supplies single link connections to the home. They don't physically split off a fiber pair to a home until the dwelling signs up for a connection though the connection/installation is free. They currently estimate that the cost per connection is ~$500 though it is going down over time. Usually takes them about a day to do the hookup. They benefit greatly from the majority (~90%) of the power lines being above ground. For smart meters at homes that aren't hooked up to fiber they rely on wireless for the data transport to concentrators/transponders on poles connected to dedicated fiber. All the to customer fiber is good up to at least 10 Gbps and only requires new hardware to be installed in the concentrators.

They also have the distinction of being the only video service provider to convert all the raw feeds into MP4-AVC. In addition, they also run a parallel feed of analog MPEG2 QAM along each customer fiber. This enables someone to get all the open channels directly without a setup box using any standard over the air compatible HD box/tv. All reports of the video picture quality have basically put it at the top of the charts (aka they are running 20+ Mbps MP4-AVC for each channel where as most people are running 10-15 Mbps MPEG2).

Also impressive is that they have up to 160K+ residential customers, a good number of which are fairly rural and haven't previously been able to get either DSL or cable.

Another interesting tidbit is that so far they've seen roughly equal upstream and downstream aggregate bandwidth.

I find it rather depressing that my parents living in generally rural area in Tennessee have better connectivity options than I do living in San Francisco or anywhere else in the bay area (you know, silicon valley, the heart of high tech)!

 

bundled with TV service, the costs for 30/30 are about in the same range (+/- $5). If their past trends hold, you'll be able to get 50/50 for the same price early next year. Instead of dropping the baseline prices they've been upping service over time. At the very beginning 15/15 cost what 30/30 does now. Then they upped it to 20/20 and finally 30/30 all within about a year.

 

living in australia reading this thread makes me a sad panda, stuck on ADSL2 about 4km from exchange line sync is all over the place from 3mbit to about 7mbit. one day i might be so lucky to get GPON. I used to look after a multihomed internet gateway so that was alrigth for data access but since changing jobs no such luxuary


just as im about to hit submit i hear the tick of the router loosing line sync...........

 

I have fibre at my house but it costs more and is slower than regular ADSL!

Mine is worse than yours, its a tease with no relenting.

 

MBytes or Mbits?

 

its not that simple, a bunch of laws need to be passed to allow NBNco to operate. basiclly there are 150 seat in the house of reps, last ellection labor got 72 and the liberal/national party 73, labor made deals with the greens and inderpendants to get over the line and form government (76 seats). if anyone crosses the floor they are in trouble

On top of that they dont control the lower house either with a crazy "faimly first" party (religious nut jobs) controlling the balance of power unit july next year. on top of that rupert murdochs News corp are running a massive FUD campain, they are actually lying in quite a few instances.

it pains me but the NBN is far for certian.