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."
Re:Brilliant! (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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.
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:Think of the Backbone (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)
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.
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.
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 doesn't have that problem to the degree those of us in the U.S. do.
Whats wrong in the U.S. (Score:2, Insightful)
Too much (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
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: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.
Re:Doesn't really matter (Score:2, Insightful)
unfortunately, American businesses are so obsessed about squeezing every penny out of their customers that they can, that they have to clue how to actually provide a service that people will pay for and be loyal to. I'm not sure why Comcast would rather squeeze $50/month out of me, and have me pissed off at them for everything from lousy customer service to service restrictions, and have me tell anyone who will listen that they should look for any viable alternative in their area that to have me pay $45 per month and provide great service that I tell everyone they should sign up for. I would imagine that just the 2-3 extra people who might sign up due to glowing reviews of their service would more than pay for the infrastructure required to make us all happy. The record and movie industries are the same. Capitalism made America strong in years gone buy, and could do so again, but rampant greed does not necessarily equate to good capitalism. If the damned government would get their heads out of their asses and stop allowing these damned companies (since when is a corporation a fucking citizen) to have what amounts to a monopoly, perhaps real true competition would rectify the problem. But, as I said, heads up asses... We're screwed.
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.
Re:Think of the Backbone (Score:1, Insightful)
The backbone is not the issue. You have to take a look at the countries with these high-speed networks like South Korea, Japan, Sweden. The same factors crop up:
- small geographical size (reach more people with less infrastructure)
- generally quite dense population centres (possibly not the case with Sweden)
- the native language is fairly unique to the country.
I can't emphasise the last point enough. The majority of content viewed in Japan will be in Japanese and hosted locally. And for those who know how peering agreements work, this will not cost the ISPs a cent to deliver.
Unfortunately I live in Australia, which satisfies none of the above three points and hence languishes behind in broadband delivery technology.
Re:Too much (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Think of the Backbone (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:Synchronous? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, I meant symmetric. Sorry, my brain fart. I was rushing out the door before posting and couldn't get the right word out.
I knew, however, that some pedantics would show up and correct the oversight in a suitably (im)mature fashion.
Re:Brilliant! (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 legal system that deters such bastards.
If everyone in the USA could get Gigabit to the home, even if it only translated to 1mbit per user to the outside world, holy crap can you even begin to imagine the uses for that sort of bandwidth ? How about hi-def Youtube ? How about IPTV for the masses ? How about not having to wrestle with QOS tweaks to get goddamned VoIP working properly ?
As long as same-network traffic is unmetered, this kind of deployment can lead to huge cultural changes.
Re:Why don't we just use the telegraph? (Score:3, Insightful)
Examine the population density of various major US and Japanese cities. They're surprisingly comparable.
Re:Easy for Japan (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 this case, the US, Japan and even Canada (at 3.2/km2) are going to have similar population densities. So I have a hard time thinking that this rollout in Japan is going to be significantly less expensive than it would be in the US.
Re:Think of the Backbone (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 they'd rather keep the money for themselves.
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.