Japan To Get 1Gbps Home Fiber Connections 275
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."
Synchronous? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:If you can afford a single-family home in Tokyo (Score:1, Informative)
While what you say is largely true, suburbs that are about an hour by train can be quite inexpensive. And most companies buy a monthly pass for you. And where I live in Osaka, the rent is lower compared to the place I was renting back in India.
On topic, this is awesome news indeed. I currently pay 5500 Yen for a 100Mbps from K-Opt/eonet(http://eonet.jp). But too bad that I am living in the western part of Japan.
Re:Hope they start using bittorrent (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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. ^^
Re:Brilliant! (Score:2, Informative)
Actually you are off by a little bit. Bytes are measured in powers of 1024, while bits are not. Thus you need to adjust by a factor of 2^30/10^9.
Or 30 GB * (1 S/Gb) * (Gb/10^9 b) * (8 b / B) * (2^30 B / GB) = 4 minutes 18 seconds
Re:Think of the Backbone (Score:1, Informative)
IIRC, Bredbandsbolaget has said that they will upgrade all their fiber customers to 1000/1000 by 2010.
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.
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.
Re:If the island of Japan can do this... (Score:2, Informative)
It is not entirely about population or population density. There's almost as much people in London as there are people in the whole of Sweden. UK people should on average have better internet access than us swedes.
Population:
Sweden: 9,2 million
UK: 60 million (7 million in London)
Land area:
Sweden: 450 000 square kilometer
UK: 245 000 square kilometer
Population density:
Sweden: 20 individuals / square kilometer
UK: 250 individuals / square kilometer
US: 30 individuals / square kilometers (still there should be enough people in the big cities to support some insane broadband)
(numbers from wikipedia)
Re:Not hard technology; it's the politics (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:If you can afford a single-family home in Tokyo (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, enjoy the same entertainment, avoid traveling around, etc), but once you do prices become quite reasonable -- even in Tokyo.