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Japan To Get 1Gbps Home Fiber Connections
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Sep 27, 2008 01:24 PM
from the yes-but-food-is-cheaper-elsewhere dept.
from the yes-but-food-is-cheaper-elsewhere dept.
ashitaka writes "KDDI has announced that they will be launching a 1Gbps Internet service to single-family home and condo users in October. The service is supposedly synchronous, with 1Gbps in both directions, although the article implies that speeds will vary with location. Cost will be 5,985 yen/month (about US$56.50) for the basic Internet and IP phone service. This is intended to compete with NTT, who currently control over 70% of the Japanese FTTH market."
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Hope they start using bittorrent (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hope they start using bittorrent (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They have their own slashdot [slashdot.jp] too..
Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)
That makes it much more likely that Japanese slashdot users will get first post!
Wouldn't do us here in the US much good (Score:2)
Just means we would reach our cap that much sooner. And of course, the ISP's would just go off and over sell that too.
Think of the Backbone (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought the service providers were already complaining about individual users clogging up "the pipes".
Giving a bigger bandwidth to end users is just asking for more backend network congestion.
Unless they are expecting us to continue along the http: clicky traffic model with all this new bandwidth.
YouTube and movie on demand services look more usable with this increased bandwidth.
I suppose the service providers are drooling at the thought of pricing per gigabyte downloads along the lines of text-message pricing.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Then upgrade the backbone. Instead of limiting the speed for end users, invest in the backbone and eliminate the clogging. I'm guessing Japan doesn't have that big of a problem with the backbone though. (neither does Sweden it would appear, I can easily reach 100 Mbps if I download directly from someone else on a 100 Mbps connection within Sweden)
Re:Think of the Backbone (Score:4, Informative)
I work at tech support for one of swedens largest ISP:s (bredbandsbolaget). We're currently testing 1gbit-connections with a couple of hundred customers. I'm guessing we'll start selling to the general public within the next two years or so. ^^
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The US is larger than both Sweden and Japan, yes. But it also has a larger population, and thus a larger economy than either, which should be able to support that infrastructure.
And the US has a higher population density that Sweden.
You have highways running all over the country right? Why wouldn't you make the same investment for the backbone?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're being gouged. I pay less than that for 100/100. If there is any sort of competition (from what I've heard, competition is lacking in the US broadband market though), the ISPs would invest that money without rate hikes in order to attract more customers. It's not like they don't have any profit margin on those 55 dollars a month they charge you.
They probably make huge profits but they are unwilling to invest in infrastructure because it's a long term investment. It doesn't pay off within 6 months so t
Not in Japan (Score:5, Informative)
I thought the service providers were already complaining about individual users clogging up "the pipes". Giving a bigger bandwidth to end users is just asking for more backend network congestion.
Far from it, actually. Japan is the world leader in internet infrastructure.
See the recent study [google.com] that quantified this into a "bandwidth quality score" for 42 countries. Japan's score was basically double everyone else. USA scored 16th, UK 24th.
And their population is only a little less than half of the United States, but being spread out over an area 25 times smaller is really what makes adoption a bit easier for them.
Parent
Re:Not in Japan (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that the size of a country is what holds it back from high speed access is a myth. Japan may be smaller than the US, but it is a lot larger than the UK and contains some really difficult terrain. Yet, they are still pushing for universal fibre access by 2010, even in small remote villages in mountainous regions.
If it was simply a question of population density, then why does no-where in the UK have fibre yet? Why does fibre in the US seem to be stuck at 20mb?
The reason Japan is so fast is that the government decided BB was an important infrastructure/utility, like the road and rail networks or the electricity grid, and pushed it forwards themselves. After nationalising all our publicly owned infrastructure and utilities here in the UK, we are now realising that they need to be state owned or heavily state regulated or the country as a whole suffers. I expect BB will go the same way eventually, or we will simply fall very far behind and loose out to the rest of Europe.
Parent
If you can afford a single-family home in Tokyo... (Score:5, Insightful)
Chances are good the price you pay for your Internet access is largely irrelevant.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I guess this is off topic, but I have to agree with you. I think that people think of Japan as crowded and expensive because they come here as tourists. They go to all the famous sites where people are jammed in like sardines. And they buy stuff at tourist places and get ripped off. Or eat steak at a restaurant.
I've been living here a year (admittedly in the inaka) and I spend *far* less than I did in Canada. Of course, you have to live like a Japanese person (buy the same food, wear the same clothes,
Synchronous? (Score:2)
Re:Synchronous? (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's really synchronous. That's how they can afford to do it cheaply. It works like this:
Suppose you want to download a video. For every packet of the video you download, you need to upload one. Now naturally, you can't upload somebody else's copyrighted content. So you have to upload original video content that somebody else wants to watch.
The main sponsors of the rollout are porn companies, because that's the only kind of marketable content most people can create. Some camwhores will probably do all right, too. And if you live in an interesting neighborhood, you can put up some webcams to meet the synchronous data requirement.
Most people, though, won't be able to generate enough content, so they'll have to pay extra to get the synchronous requirement waved. It's sort of like how cellphone companies sell you a cheap plan, knowing they'll screw you on extras.
Parent
Synchronous? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Slashdot, get your act together! (Score:4, Informative)
Not Slashdot's fault. Mine. I've been putting in networks long enough (22 years) to know the difference.
Must be getting senile.
Parent
Not hard technology; it's the politics (Score:5, Interesting)
It must be almost 10 years now since I wrote (Ethernet inventor) Bob Metcalfe when he was an Infoworld columnist, to ask why the hell North America was building an Internet system out of wires installed for completely different purposes: a 1930's POTS network and a 1970's cable-TV network. There was much talk about the "unaffordable" trillions it would take to run fiber to every home.
This begged the question of how we managed to run phone to every home with the much-smaller 1920's-1940's economy to draw on, then did it all again with more-expensive cable in a decade over the 1970's. And, you see, I work for a water and sewer utility and KNOW what it costs to run big, heavy, iron 6" diameter pipes both to and from your street and get payback on the capital out of the $40/month water bill, even after operating costs.
Metcalfe had no reply, he tossed it to his readers; none of whom had an answer either, save those who wrote me by E-mail to rail against telephone monopolies and lobbyist-ruined governance.
What's Japan going to DO with 1Gbps? By the time we find out, it'll take us over a decade to catch up, even if all the monopolies and lobbies are broken the next day. (In my business, we used to get a few gallons per day of water out of wells and have a shower once a week or so; now consumption can be a ton of water per day per person and we shower all we want, we have hot tubs and pools, kids in Nevada learn to swim, we irrigate gardens, and fill our cities with trees in arid climates: trust me, uses for bandwidth WILL arise, and our kids will wonder how we got by without.)
Americans might want to start getting advice from the British on how you handle it, psychologically, when you wake up a decade or so into a new century and realize that you just aren't the most important nation on Earth anymore.
What's Japan going to DO with 1Gbps? (Score:3, Insightful)
Watch streaming video without having to hit 'pause' on the player to let it fully buffer before even starting to play?
Not have to shut down other applications because my 4 BitTorrent connections are making my email logon time out and my web browser not load images on the pages (assuming it can even load the page to begin with)?
Lots of possibilities for new applications, but just fixing the current problems would be marvelous.
Yeah, these problems won't be fixed without backbone upgrades, but I bet Japan does
Re:Not hard technology; it's the politics (Score:5, Funny)
Americans might want to start getting advice from the British on how you handle it, psychologically, when you wake up a decade or so into a new century and realize that you just aren't the most important nation on Earth anymore
You become terribly bitter and unhappy, but you try really hard not to show it. Then you invent Monty Python.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In terms of their GDP, yes, their debt is massive (nearly double their GDP, compared to ~60% in the US's case), but their current accounts (effectively trade balance) is in much better shape than the US, sitting at about 200 billion (2nd highest only after China) in the positive, compared to the US which is over 7 trillion in the negative.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I always wonder when people say this kind of thing because I never find Japan to seem overly crowded. So I looked it up.
Japan *does* have roughly 10 times the population density of the US (339/km2 vs 31/km2). But in comparison to Europe, it's not really very different. For instance the Netherlands and Belgium have higher population densities (395 and 341). The UK has similar density at 246.
But I think especially when we're talking about fiber rollout, we're mostly talking about doing so in *cities*. In
Funny how we hear (Score:4, Insightful)
that the world is getting more bandwidth capacity to individuals on new technology, whereas most of the US is on cable modem and we're getting new restrictions after years of unannounced restrictions placed on our bandwidth.
The reason is obvious. (Score:5, Funny)
Their appetite for tentacle rape porn is insatiable. I expect we'll see another bandwidth increase in about 6 months. Honestly, how much tentacle rape porn can there be in the world?!?!
Re: (Score:2)
Honestly, how much tentacle rape porn can there be in the world?!?!
There can never be enough.
how far does the 1Gbps go? in town only? in the lo (Score:2)
how far does the 1Gbps go? in town only? in the local switch only?
Two words (Score:2)
No Fair!!
I wish I could get 1/10th of this at a decent price. Good for them though
Whats wrong in the U.S. (Score:2, Insightful)
Questionnaire for comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
I pay $58/month for symetric 100Mbps in Sweden.
Too much (Score:3, Insightful)
If the island of Japan can do this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Some countries claim their size holds them back but the UK doesn't have that excuse. We're just getting screwed.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We do have fiber at work and that's one of the joys of getting in before 8am before anyone else. The speeds I get are enough to make me cum my pants harder than any woman could do for me.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Brilliant! (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, he has a very good point.
Imagine a botnet of 10000 zombied windows machines on 3.0Mbps up/down.
Now imagine a botnet of 10000 zombied windows machines on 1Gbps up/down.
Now if you're the target of the latter botnets DoS attack, i'm sure you'd be asking "what in the hell do they need that much upstream for to begin with!".
Some would have very good uses for that bandwidth but if their market is anything like what I see in north america, at least half or more will be people who get it because of shinyness or the myth of the best. Depending on the ToS, this could be quite the liability for the rest of the world at large unless enough of the worlds backbones are similarly upgraded to handle the home user market hitting 1Gbps+. Not saying it is a bad thing overall, simply that the concern is valid and that given time it will no longer be a problem. Right now, he has a point.
Parent
Doesn't really matter (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll be hard for you to tell the difference
I think most sites don't even have a 1Gbps link.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It does for sites that have the lower total throughput but have a fair bit of redundancy in place for security sake. If your disaster recovery analysis is based on the average zombie having access to 3-10Mbit, then a sudden influx of zombied 1Gbps links would definitely pooch the whole deal and make your "redundancy" rather useless. THAT is where the difference would be seriously noticeable.
You're right though for cases of smaller providers using a single connection for the entirety of their service. In tho
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The fallacy in this argument is that a million Japanese bot-hosts with a million 1Gbps uplinks will not translate to a Petabyte per second of spam, because the bottleneck at the edge of the network remains the same. If anything, it will make such botnets far more noticeable, since high-speed sustained traffic will stand out compared to bursty user activity.
Re:Doesn't really matter (Score:4, Insightful)
true, but also i don't think limiting consumer broadband speeds is a sound method of combating the DDoS problems.
i'm sure 1Gbps up/down sounds ridiculous to many Americans, but it probably doesn't sound so absurd to Japanese consumers. i assume that if they've decided to make such an upgrade to consumer level broadband speed, then they're probably making equivalent increases to business connections. it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that bandwidth costs will decrease over time. this is just an indication that Japan is ahead of the curve right now.
i mean, you're not going to give a home user a 1 Gbps connection if the ISP can't handle that. and if the ISP can handle all home users having 1 Gbps then they can surely handle much bigger pipes for business/enterprise users.
so maybe it's time for the U.S. to stop dicking around, wasting resources on packet shaping/bandwidth throttling (you know, spend money on actually increasing broadband speeds?) unless we want to be left in the dust. if we started increasing our network capacity to handle 1 Gbps home connections, then we won't have to worry about being DDoSed by 1 Gbps botnets.
Parent
Re:Doesn't really matter (Score:5, Insightful)
We also have to wait for the internet to catch up too. YouTube is still showing video at ADSL1 bitrates, and most (good) websites are still mainly text-only (thank god).
I predict that we're within "a generation" of superfluous bandwidth - that is, regular home connections will never even come close to completely saturated under reasonable use, because the content is simply not heavy enough. This is similar to what's happened with processing power (a P4 is more powerful than Joe User will ever need) and hard disk space (I've never heard of a non-nerd actually filling as much as 120GB). The only "killer app" I can imagine that'll take bandwidth into the final generation before superfluous bandwidth is streamed high-resolution video (YouTubeHD, etc). After that, we'll probably start to see mobile internet become more and more prevalent, as we have seen with the miniaturisation of computers due to superfluous processing/storage. Of course, there'll always be us nerds who'll never be able to have enough, but we're in the minority so we'll probably stay glued to wires, as we have been glued to desktops in the land of the laptop (yes, I know most/all of us have laptops, but that's usually in addition to some kind of powerful desktop/high capacity homebrew server).
Personally, I think that 1GB/s synchronous is probably well within the category of "superfluous bandwidth" - that's more than enough for streaming high resolution video.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe your hypothetical person under attack from botnets should move to Japan and get cheap broadband.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
Only thing they'll be good for DoS attacking is something in Japan because they'll instantly hit a bottleneck of epic proportions the moment they try to touch the US Network with all its bandwidth problems :P
I think some ISP in Japan recently capped their users at like 250 GB A DAY... Whatever Japan is doing is what the US should be doing in terms of expanding their network. I understand theres alot more problems like distance and such but still.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see much use for 1Gbps either, I rarely use the full capacity of my 100 Mbps. But there will probably come some use for 1 Gbps connections in the future, so it's always good to be ready. Who would have predicted 100 Mbps being (somewhat, here at least) common (or having a use) 10 years ago when we were waiting for DSL to get us out of the dial-up world.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
Considering that blue-ray is 1080p, but limited to 54Mbps, I think one can safely assume, that 1Gbps is not entirely necessary for that kind of thing.
Super HiVision, on the other hand, would be a different matter.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Slow down, you're just jealous.
This is EXACTLY what civilized nations should be doing. Gigabit fiber is about as fast as you can go on such a wide-scale before cost shoots to infinity.
They won't have 1Gbps to the rest of the world, but as a local interconnect, it's excellent. The main pipe leading out of Japan will still be the same size, and you'll get the same volume of Viagra spam as always. Actually most of that garbage comes from China, Malaysia and Brazil - Japan actually does have a functional leg
Re: (Score:2)
"Try 4 minutes"
wouldnt it be 30 seconds? or even 15 seconds if you are downloading and uploading at cap.
Its 4 minutes if its 1024/8 which is a 1GB line, not 1GB Per Second
Not that it matters cause neither the 1Gbps nor the 30GB cap reality, or proven yet.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
you're forgetting the difference between GB and Gb (bytes vs. bits). there are 8 Gb in 1 GB.
If the connection is 1Gbps: 30 GB * 8 GB/Gb = 240 Gb, which is 240 seconds. 240 seconds is 4 minutes.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Examine the population density of various major US and Japanese cities. They're surprisingly comparable.