100Mbps Home Internet Service Next Year in Finland 313
Listen Up writes "According to an article on CNN, broadband Internet access via cable modems in Finland will be able to hit 100 Mbps as early as 2006. That would be 50 times faster than the average broadband speeds now offered to cable TV homes in Finland. Do you think this technology has the possibility of reaching U.S. shores? Or do you think the already deeply entrenched U.S. politics are going to keep this technology from ever reaching us? There are already thousands and thousands of miles of 'dark fiber' underground around the U.S."
Motorola is helping Singapore with the same tech (Score:3, Informative)
why is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Not fully usable, obviously (Score:5, Informative)
You might suggest that 100Mbps would be great for BitTorrent and the like, but the flaw is that ISP's backbones and peering arrangements are measured in gigabits, not terabits. Even an OC-48 can only take 24 customers maxing out their bandwidth on this system. A big European ISP like Demon only has 2Gbps going into the LINX.. enough for, wow, 20 customers to max out their bandwidth.
The ratio of guaranteed bandwidth to advertised bandwidth on this offering is crazy. Backbones just aren't there yet.
The problem is the last mile... (Score:5, Informative)
So what? The problem is not bandwidth in total, it is making the connection to the home to the nearest big fiber point. DSL and cable are popular with ISPs because the cables already go to the customer. Running broadband over a phone line or cable costs next to nothing. The big cost was digging up the street to put in the wire. After that, the operating costs are minimal.
If you go to a big US colocation facility, you will find that a lot of bandwidth is really cheap, because the fiber is already there. If you want a fiber connection to your home, you will have to pay an arm and a leg to put the fiber in the ground.
Wireless ISPs have a big potential advantage since they can avoid the last mile problem.
Bredbands Bolaget (Score:1, Informative)
(http://www.bredbandsbolaget.se/ [bredbandsbolaget.se]
Re:Completely different scale issues (Score:5, Informative)
100mbit is here (Score:2, Informative)
Admittedly it's only to their fiber/LAN-customers (which I am a part of) and with a traffic cap at 300GB/month as well as a rather hefty pricetag of approx US$113/month.
But it's available to the crazies who want it.
Re:Dark Fiber (Score:5, Informative)
Both DSL and cable internet are provided by way of fiber - its just cheaper to convert to another medium for the "last mile". See Comcast's recent dark fiber aquisition [cmcsk.com].
Re:why is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Of course if you live in a single-broadband-provider city like I do, it's hard to imagine why they'd bother.
Re:What is the (Score:5, Informative)
I know there are better ways to control the aggregate amount of bandwidth being consumed, but this is a simple way of doing it that is acceptable by a huge percentage of the consumers buying cable or DSL service. Those who really would like to have parity between their down and up speeds are exactly the customers ISPs don't want on residential service. They will lose money on you.
There's nothing evil about that.
(I know the parent poster didn't say they're being evil, but that's the general impression I get on these threads sometimes.)
Re:What is the upload speed (Score:3, Informative)
300kbps ~= 38kBps
Usually, I replace the 'p' with a '/' when dealing with bytes, too (i.e., "38kB/s"). By no means a standard notation, but it works for me. Though it isn't widely used, I've also recently taken to using the IEC's units. For example:
300kbps ~= 38KiBps
(300 kilobits per second ~= 38 kibibytes per second)
Why? Because in a technical context, it's certainly much clearer. If I say I am transferring 1 kilobyte of data, does that mean 1,000 bytes or 1,024 bytes? It's ambiguous, and in design issues, it can be a critical difference.
Also, the baud rate is the signal transition rate, not the bit rate. Maybe in modems the baud rate and bit rate were usually the same, but it isn't necessarily the case. It is possible (and common) to transmit more than one bit per transition.
Anyway... that's all.
Re:Skeptical (Score:1, Informative)
I would venture to say that if the technology came that allowed 100 Mbps over copper (or cable TV) and thus didn't require rolling out fiber everywhere, the operators over here would offer it.
And yes, Japan is lightyears ahead, I don't deny that. But they have the advantage of huge population density (Japan has 300+ people per square km, USA has 30 and Finland has 15). On the other hand, this just raises the question why companies in the USA don't provide good broadband connections to their customers, even in metropolitan areas, when Finland is able to do it with a lower population density..
And don't try with the "oh, but USA is so big!" angle. They *could* roll the service out in select areas or even all of them at once - every area would pay for itself, since it's just a matter of population density. What's the problem?
Re:why is this news? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What is the (Score:3, Informative)
One cable channel can serve up to 40Mbps but a single upstream channel is limited to 8Mbps. So for cable (DOCSIS) systems, this would typically be around 1/5, which is approximately what my ISP is sticking with, at around 1/6. (I know each serving group could include an arbitrary number of upstream and downstream channels but I suspect most cable ISPs, including my own, play cheap.)
BTW, there are places where 100Mbps and FTTH are already common, the catch is that these are shared networks. IIRC, in Sweden, a company basically puts everyone on a 100Mbps switched network with a single 100Mbps uplink. There is also Verizon's "Fios" where every house appears to become a node that injects and extracts traffic from an optical ring network. (Why else would the base installation require an SLA battery to specifically power the optical network tap?)
Re:100mbit is here (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What is the upload speed (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What is the upload speed (Score:3, Informative)
Not to further nit-pick, but 300 baud is 300 "symbols" per second. Using constellation diagrams 1 symbol can correspond to a variable number of bits.
In a dialup modem, 8000 baud is used at 7 databits per symbol to arrive at 56Kbps.
Re:bandwidth cross borders? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:bandwidth cross borders? (Score:2, Informative)
s/in Finland/by a Finnish manufacturer/ (Score:2, Informative)
Presentation about this thing at http://www.goodmood.net/teleste_vg_preview/pres2/T eleste_2.html [goodmood.net]
Re:bandwidth cross borders? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Skeptical (Score:1, Informative)
ASDL: 0.5-8Mbit/s
SHDSL: 0.5-2Mbit/s
VDSL 2-wire: 4.6mbit/s
VDSL 4-wire: 2 x above, 9.2Mbit/s
ADSL2+ : 8-24.5Mbit/s (1Mbit upstream)
ADSL2+"+": 8-24.5Mbit/s (3Mbit upstream)
ADSL2x(?): 50Mbit (testing equipment)
Fiber: 10-1000Mbit/s
International connectivity is several Gbit/s, cannot give exact numbers but it has never been fully consumed.
This Teleste thing is not vaporware, there are also other small companies who offer very fast modems. Only problem is that they seem to focus on cellular/transmission market so IOS like IP features are not available. That sucks. Modem+router is not a good solution for private customers. Too expensive for us and too complicated for most of the customers.