24 Mb Consumer Broadband Launched

twilight30 writes to tell us The Guardian is reporting that broadband provider "Be" is providing customers with the option of a 24 megabits per second download speed connection. These speeds are roughly three times the closest local competitor and also allow 1.3 megabits per second upstream, roughly five times quicker than any other service provider. The service is being offered at £24 (US $42.84) per month. Hopefully this will become a trend of radically increasing consumer internet speeds.

Australia first

[davisk]

Internode [on.net] have offered this in Australia for some time. Wish it was available where I am, but i'm stuck on 12000/1000 with iinet [iinet.com.au] (no, i don't work for either of them, but i've been a happy customer of both)

Unlimited Use

[LordMyren]

Wasnt it not all that long ago the UK was charging per-minute? It seemed unlimited use dialup was always very rare. Something in the back of my mind buzzes about phone use & taxes or something, but I dunno.

Congradz though, that sounds truly excellent. I'm glad to see someone going above 768k upstream. Thats the barrier I thought would never be crossed.

-Myren

I have had 26 Mbps for 3 years

[G3ckoG33k]

This IS old news... I have had this service for three years, but in Sweden.

The cool thing, apart from the bandwidth is that it comes directly through the telephone jacket. No need for new cables.

Re:Unlimited Use

[saitoh]

might be, one of the strings attached is:

"To subscribe customers must have a BT phone line"

although I'm not sure what plans BT has to offer, I know that culturally it seems to have been the norm in the market place to have per-min charges on the phone instead of a flat rate per month.

Re:Not gonna happen here...

[ReformedExCon]

"It would be nice if this would be implemented here in the states, but the corporate entities that provide teh high speed internet access are quite greedy and, if/when they manage to provide that kind of bandwith, it would cost tremendously more than $43 a month."

That wouldn't be the case if the U.S. government saw fit to fund such a program. If the internet is a good thing, as I hope we can all agree, then getting it into the homes of every citizen ought to be a goal that we can all rally around. If companies are unwilling to bring forth broadband services to uncompetitive areas, the government can use a combination of carrots and sticks to goad private enterprises into those areas.

Is it a little bit Socialist? Yeah, sure. But legislated and managed effectively, it can be economically implemented with very little raise in costs (taxes) to the average citizen. Since we are talking about the UK in this article, we can look at their NHS program and see how much more services are provided at a lower average cost than the same services in the U.S. Government funding doesn't need to be some mysterious, mismanaged black hole. It only seems that way because we elect leaders who are more interested in getting pork barrel spending for their home districts rather than helping the entire country.

Real speed

[robvangelder]

I get suspicious of the reported speeds.

I wonder how an ISP can really talk about Internet speeds. The Internet speed is outside of their control. One day you might get 24Mb but the next 12Mb. Some sites might not even have 24Mb!

What the ISP reports is very likely "your place to ISP" speeds, not "your place to deadbeef.com"

I know that when I dial-up 56k, I'm pretty likely to get 56k no matter where I surf.
As my bandwidth increases (256Kb, 2Mb, 24Mb), it gets less and less likely I'm going to get that service to any one site.

Another thing to consider is that ISPs typically don't give you dedicated 24Mb.
You get 24Mb on the "your place to ISP" line, then you and all other customers share the "ISP to internet" line.
ISPs work out peak usage and ensure no customer gets capped - or at least, the good ones do.

So while you might get 24Mb to the ISP, it'll depend a lot on time of day, internet conditions, destination site, etc..

Until an industry accepted standard/metric index appears, these reported speeds are the best we've got to go on.

Fact of Life in Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

Download caps are a fact of life in Australia. All ISP's have them, because we have to pay lots of money for international data.

Internode does offer flatrate at ADSL2+ speeds, but you are prioritised during periods of high network usage (depending on a 7 day rolling total of downloads).

Re:Australia first

[JuzzFunky]

I'm with Internode's 24Mb plan.
If you exceed your download limit your connection will be 'shaped'. You are never charged more than your usual monthly fee. As I understand it (and I am open to correction) Shaping involves slwoing your connection down if and only if their servers are under heavy load (ie. it is affecting other users). They do this to keep things fair for all of their users. I've been over my limit a number of times and have not noticed any slow down at all.
What I like about it is that they are very explicit about the limits of their service.

From the Be site: https://www.bethere.co.uk/beonline/acceptableUse.d o/ [bethere.co.uk]
"If it's felt that any member's Internet activities are so excessive that other members are detrimentally affected, Be may give the member generating the excessive web traffic a written warning (by email or otherwise). In extreme circumstances, should the levels of activity not immediately decrease after the warning, Be may terminate that member's services."

The reality of it all is that you will not find many people out there serving up content at 24Mb. Except for direct conections with Internode's mirrors and Gaming Servers (which make the whole thing worth while!) you'll be spending your time waiting for the Internet to catch up with you.

Re:Australia first

[mattjb0010]

This, I think, makes Be's service significantly better.

There's also a lot of local content (eg ABC) that doesn't count to the cap. Internode have a lot of nice things (including a wide range of Linux and BSD distros) on their mirror site. Further, Internode provision a lot of backhaul capacity, and their own direct links to the US via Southern Cross cable. The two good effects of having the cap: they are able to maintain better backhaul capacity, and this stays freer due to people not downloading as much. 15GB a month is a lot of traffic for me, anyway. Also, I need the speed for running X11 over ssh tunnels from Linux to OS X boxes.

Re:Not gonna happen here...

[TheGSRGuy]

I could see this being used more for small businesses right now, not consumers. A small engineering firm with say, 20 employees, could get a lot of use from this moving big CAD files to and from customers. Even branch offices of larger companies could use it for some wicked-fast VPN connections to a corporate server.

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[moro_666]

#1 56 mbits would be heaven ? nah, i dont really think so :) at first, if 3 users with 56Mbit lines would start to download from a server that sits in a rack behind a 100Mbit ethernet ... they would want to pull 56*3=168 Mbits out from the 100Mbit ethernet ... so they will just not be able to really use their bandwidth and the server will be jammed .... and for most of users, even 8Mbit is a huge overkill, cause people that dont download movies/cd-images/adult-movies/music each day, mostly have latency issues (they click and the browser doesnt react within a second, waaah) and the larger the bandwidth distributed over several users, the larger the latency (routers & co have their limits). ofcourse a big maximal downloadspeed is great but i dont think that the rest of the network isnt quite ready for it, it might not be such a good idea (most of our country's server hosting providers have 100Mbit ethernet/internet lines for the servers, so 4 british haxors can now jamm my server)

#2 i wonder how they can afford it ... the last time i checked the broadband companys themselves have to pay for each mbit they transit, so if they have a nice schoolful of haxxors who download stuff 24/7 then their downloaded/uploaded mbits will cost more than the 24 pounds that are charged ... ofcourse some users use less than that ... but still, it's still curious

#3 while they're at it, i'd even be lucky to get a 8mbit connection for 24 pounds over here

The West is so far behind...

[Rocketship Underpant]

Here in Japan, I have 55 megabit fiber DSL. I'm still getting used to it. I can multiple download files at 1 MB/sec (that's megabyte, not megabit), and that's when there's a bottleneck at the other end. :)

Re:Australia first

[ColaMan]

Meanwhile, Be has no download cap whatsoever. This, I think, makes Be's service significantly better.

You're comparing apples to oranges a little here. Internode (in Australia) is crippled somewhat by the limited capacity and high cost of overseas links.

Be had better be prepared for the incredible amount of leeeeching. 24Mbps is no good if you'll only get that to the next system upstream at the Be office, with 5k/s to The Rest Of The World. As pretty much all relevant ISPs (that is, the ones that are still in business) have discovered, truly unlimited high-speed internet is not a good, sustainable business plan at the moment.

This is why Internode, for example, have plans that get shaped to 64kbps after your limit. They also have flatrate plans that (after a set amount) dynamically prioritise your packets depending on how much you've downloaded compared to everyone else online at the moment. These are more expensive (AUD100-200/month). Then you have the true, unlimited 'leased-line' style plans, which cost in the order of AUD500-1000 a month.

So I wonder how much backbone capacity Be has, and I also wonder how long it will be before they completely oversubscribe it to the point of end-users leaving. I give it 6 months, tops. Bookmark this post :-)

Re:Me me me

[SoloFlyer2]

I already have it... :)

This is being provided by almost every ISP in australia except Tel$tra
It is of course very distance dependant
Basically they just have ADSL2+ DLSAMs and they let you run at the maximum speed allowed by the ADSL 2+ specification, so you only get the maximum speed (24000/1000) if you are close enough to the DSLAM for it to work at that speed, since im quite far away from the DSLAM i only get about 5000/1000, but thats a hell of a lot faster than 1500/256, which is the maximum avaiable on Tel$tra DSLAMs

http://www.internode.on.net/adsl2/graph/index.htm [on.net] A Nice Little Graph with distance/speed :)

Universal multicasting

[TeXMaster]

#1 56 mbits would be heaven ? nah, i dont really think so :) at first, if 3 users with 56Mbit lines would start to download from a server that sits in a rack behind a 100Mbit ethernet ... they would want to pull 56*3=168 Mbits out from the 100Mbit ethernet ... so they will just not be able to really use their bandwidth and the server will be jammed .... and for most of users, even 8Mbit is a huge overkill, cause people that dont download movies/cd-images/adult-movies/music each day, mostly have latency issues (they click and the browser doesnt react within a second, waaah) and the larger the bandwidth distributed over several users, the larger the latency (routers & co have their limits). ofcourse a big maximal downloadspeed is great but i dont think that the rest of the network isnt quite ready for it, it might not be such a good idea (most of our country's server hosting providers have 100Mbit ethernet/internet lines for the servers, so 4 british haxors can now jamm my server)

I was having thoughts along the same lines. While the backbones of the internet might still be safely many orders of magnitude wider channels that such theoritecial limits reachable by end-users (and even if it's not 24 but 12 to 20)), and thus be safe from clogging the way you describe for servers, it's sensible to remark that some servers may find themselves at a pretty bad shortage of upload bandwidth.

A possible solution is of course provider-side proxies, but this runs the risk of making the Internet "out-datish", "stale-ish", especially when the proxies are hidden and the user won't even know he's not getting fresh contents. Ok, this could be solved with intelligent proxies, but still it wouldn't solve the problem for very dynamic, yet bandwidth-intensive, applications.

So we need some new form of distributed content providing. While specific forms like BitTorrent are a nice step in that direction, I don't see them as the mean for common use (web pages, moderate multimedia content).

I was directing my thoughts towards something more low-level, maybe even at a TCP/IP level. For example, universal multicasting.

Multicasting is currently implemented in a way that is pretty much a remainder of the way radio and TV broadcasting work: the emitter is somewhat agnostic of who is going to receive, and the receivers can freely attach/detach from the 'channel', without any knowledge of who else is listening.

While that's probably the safest way to implement TCP/IP transmission to multiple destination addresses, it has several shortcomings. Some are provider dependent (it's not widespread, and some providers only have provider-local multicasting), some are structural (the number of multicasting addresses is quite small).

So a cross-provider, generally available multicasting capability (would it be possible to allow any IP to be a multicasting IP, for example?) might be the solution.

This would have enormous benefits for lots of applications, and enormously reduce bandwidth waste from lots of Internet usage. Actually, I was surprised when I found out it wasn't like this.

100Mbps in Japan for 17pounds per month

[Falcon040]

I'm living in a residential zone in Japan in Niigata, pretty near to the edge of the countryside really... Anyhow, I've got a 100Mbps fiber that only costs me 17pounds per month. Account with the company 'Nifty'. Can watch TV channels on it regularly while VoIP and video phoning back to UK.

For my 1Mbps line back in the UK, its more expensive.

Its a pity the UK is so far behind.
Japan and Korea know where the future is, and the goverment has organised a very competitive system, there are so many companies trying to offer the service.

BTW, the fiber comes in through the rough on telegraph-like lines, the same way as the power in Japan. So no expensive costs digging holes!

Re:The West is so far behind...

[achurch]

Here in Japan, I have 55 megabit fiber DSL.

That's all? I'm sitting here in Yokohama with an ONU in my kitchen, and wget doing things like this:

--15:16:09-- http://www.jp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/lin ux-2.6.13.tar.bz2 [kernel.org]
[snip]
15:16:13 (8.67 MB/s) - `linux-2.6.13.tar.bz2' saved [38372729/38372729]

Yum. Somebody slashdot me so I can finally find out how much upstream bandwidth I have--so far all I've been able to do is max out everyone else's downstream . . .

Re:And probably not even that

[AussieVamp2]

Streaming media? That would do it pretty fast, I would think, if you use that a lot.

Oh sh17!

[mcrbids]

Most consumer Internet connections are manned by consumers, who are often blissfully unaware of the fact that their (Win XP/Home) computers need to be patched, protected by Antivirus software, Anti-Spyware, and further protected not only by Windows firewall, but also a dedicated hardware firewall.

In short, the formula goes like this:

$consumerNetworkConnection * $bandwidth = $spamAndVirusVolume;

Fast pipes are good, but are they going to do what it takes to prevent their consumer users (with bandwidth pipes rivaling or exceeding many responsible commercial providers) from doing a "dumfuk" and blasting the planet with the latest worm/trojan/virus?

Re:100Mbps in Japan for 17pounds per month

[Louis Guerin]

I have 100 megabit full-duplex, unmetered, no-ports-barred internet at home, for KRW31,000 - a shade under US$30 - per month. They try to poison my dns to make me proxy through them, but that's trivial to workaround.

I've clocked 7.3 megabytes/sec inbound (from a server located about 20km away), and about 3.8 megabytes/sec outbound, so I suspect it actually IS what it says. I also run 50-100G outbound traffic per day, so I can say with some certainty that it really is unmetered.

Oh ... and I get a static IP too.

It's a beautiful thing.

L

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[Anonymous Coward]

I went to meet this lot back when they were calling themselves Avatar Broadband. The management staff have come over from Sweden where they were running B2 Bredband AB (Bredbandsbolaget), the second largest broadband service provider. They routinely offered 24MB based on ADSL2+ there, and are now giving it a go in the UK where all the current ISPs have to squeeze their existing ADSL kit. Be have no such legacy problem. Their business plan is predicated on hitting BT exchanges where there is a very high subscriber-density, thereby maximising their ROI per exchange.

Their network is based on a series of BT BES/WES 1000 circuits running from their connected exchanges back to a fibre ring between some of the major London PoPs. As they are connected into the major carrier hotels they can access some very, very low IP transit pricing from Tier 1 providers (Level3, TeliaSonera, etc.). Hence they can offer unlimited download as it doesn't really cost them that much per subscriber. Most people get nowhere near maxing their connection/download huge amounts of data anyway.

So, they have experience, a decent new network, and a compelling offering. What's not to like? (unless you live outside of London...)
 

How about 1gbit per household?

[isudoru]

Yeah, that's 1gbit for 100 households to share. But in southern Sweden, Lund to be more specific, Labs2 offers 1gbit per household for just about $109 a month.
You can read more below, but there aren't any good English sources other than forums.

Google [google.com]
http://www.labs2.se/pr/press2004113001.html [labs2.se]

I am on 24mbps for $50 a month, but there are cheaper alternatives, such as Adamos 28mbps for $44/month.

Re:Australia first

[jrockway]

> The reality of it all is that you will not find many people out there serving up content at 24Mb. Except for direct conections with Internode's mirrors and Gaming Servers (which make the whole thing worth while!) you'll be spending your time waiting for the Internet to catch up with you.

This is not entirely true. If you ever happen to be downloading from an I2-connected site from another I2-connected site you'll get GREAT transfer rates. I once installed Debian on a machine at UIC (University of Illinois at Chicago) from the debian.uchicago.edu (at the University of Chicago, a few miles away) -- I got 100Mbps down the entire time, it was great. I tried downloading some ISOs on a few other machines on that switch (gigabit uplink) and I couldn't get any transfer rate less than the maximum 100Mbps down... it was amazing. If I had a gigabit card I could have downloaded a full Debian ISO in 6 seconds :)

That's damn cool, and I want that ability in my house. And I want gigabit uplink, too, because sometimes I need to shift big files in the other direction as well. What's with the limitation of upload bandwidth anyway... running the wire to my house costs them the same amount regardless of what direction the data's going! (Oh but then they can't sell hosting services. Well, too fucking bad. Sell me bandwidth.)

It's freaking 2005 and we're excited about 25Mbps? (Japan has 100MBps for years!)

Re:24 Mb not 24 MB

[jez9999]

Your tactic might be a bit screwed when the two companies merge [cableforum.co.uk].

Over 18000 feet and still over 1Mbps!

[Wills]

"Since I live about 12,000 feet from my exchange, remote DSLAMs / FTTx are my main hope for more than 512Kbps"

My office is over 18000 feet (5.5km) from the exchange -- literally on the limit for ADSL service -- and yet I was able to get 1Mbps ADSL.

What is intriguing is that on several occasions my line has temporarily been able to boosted to around 2Mbps according to speed tests based on downloading 20MByte test files created from /dev/random. According to a telco engineer the telco had been doing experiments of some sort during tests of long line capabilities.