Japan to get 1Gb/s in the home

[rpg.314]

Green with envy.

 

[AlphaWolf]

hm... Shaw's site says 150GB/mo data transfer. Unless I'm missing something? With their pricing, their 10Mb/s offering seems to be the better option though (100GB/mo, $43/mo). I wonder when/how/if they'll switch to fibre optic. It'll be quite a massive undertaking, I presume.

Well I just pulled out my agreement and there is no mention of a cap. I guess that's been added recently (sometime in the last 15 years). Perhaps I'll test it and see what they do. There's no fee structure for overages and I doubt they would just cut people off (they probably don't want to lose a customer).

 

[DJ12]

Blimey, I thought 1/10 was just a standard thing (maybe it is in the UK). Certainly every connection i have ever tested was getting about 1/10th over here.

Anyone else in the UK doing better and if so, was ISP are you using?

I'm on Sky for the record but it was the same with BT and this is across 3 different houses.

He's probably with Virgin Media. I am too and I regularly download faster than 2 megabytes a second. Never get the fabled 20m/bit though but it usually hovers around the 19 m/bit mark I guess you need to allow a little

 

[pjbliverpool]

He's probably with Virgin Media. I am too and I regularly download faster than 2 megabytes a second. Never get the fabled 20m/bit though but it usually hovers around the 19 m/bit mark I guess you need to allow a little

Does it use a different technology to Sky/BT?

I've never understood the differences between cable, DSL, ADSL etc...

 

[DJ12]

Most of the Virgin Media network uses fibre optics to the street then copper cable to homes I think, some areas might be completely fibre optic as I know telewest were more advanced than NTL before they all became Virgin Media.

They are trailing 50mbit at the minute so there is a lot of capacity in the network (although they gimp you for 4 hours if you download more than 3gb between 4 and 9pm)

 

[PeterAce]

Yep, the NTL (now VirginMedia) network is HFC :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fibre-coaxial

 

[Freak'n Big Panda]

You can get 18Mbit from Rogers for $100/month in Toronto actually, and Bell has a 16Mbit service for $78/month, and Cogeco has something similar to Bell. Still it's bloody expensive, so I stick with my 10Mbit Rogers service at $50/month. In your case, you could get one of the WiMax services available, which cover most of southern Ontario at least. Both Rogers and Bell offer 3Mbit WiMax connections (although with rogers you have to get a business account), but at least it would be all to yourself.

I signed up for rogers extreme 10mbps. Both the rogers and bell 16/18mbps services have the 95/100 GB/m caps making them all but useless. 95gb really isn't enough btw, I do on average about 4GB a day so I'm going to run into problems with that limit. And of course UL is total shit as usual.

What I don't understand is that we should have better net in the GTA. If any company put down the capital and got some fiber in the ground they could undercut rogers and bell with ~30mbps symmetric ul/dl uncapped lines for like $60-$70/m easily. I don't see why this hasn't happened yet. Pair it with a solid advertising campaign promoting the speed advantage and you'd be sure to get enough customers.

 

[Gubbi]

The personal computer market is moving towards laptop domination. Wifi and built in 3G networking will take a larger and larger market share. It's already happening, two of my colleagues have cancelled their regular DSL internet and exclusively rely on 7.6Mb/s 3G for their laptops.

This trend undermines any investment made into ubiquitous fiber networks. The only need in the future for cable based data traffic will be for IP-TV (and similar) for the bulk of users.

Cheers

 

[Freak'n Big Panda]

well 7.6mbps 3g might work for some people but there are lots of people who would prefer faster net speeds then that. Plus that probably costs a fortune compared to wired net of similar speeds. Of course I can't wait until we have 20mbps wireless net country wide for reasonable prices but that's still a very long way out. The only thing we have here in canada that is comparable is wimax which is 3mbps and carries a 30gb/m cap as well... hardly a substitute for wired.

The reason rogers isn't upgrading their networks is simply because they have no competitive reason to do so. By and large customers aren't demanding more and bell offers throttled dsl (i.e dial up on steroids) that rogers already beats hands down so there's not much of a business case to switch to something faster. In the US it's a little bit different as verizon is taking market share like mad with their FIOS service so cable providers are feeling more pressure to upgrade their networks to DOCSIS 3.0 (rogers is still on 2.0).