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."
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.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:2, Interesting)
Supposedly NHK will begin "broadcasting" streaming HDTV over the internet later this year or early next year. 1Gbps will allow this to happen without compressing the data into artifact hell.
Questionnaire for comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
I pay $58/month for symetric 100Mbps in Sweden.
Re:Doesn't really matter (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.
FIOS (Score:2, Interesting)
FWIW, I'm in the Seattle 'burbs and just got Verizon FIOS 20/20. The router claims that it's connected to the CO at 251mbps and the techs I talked to said the system and the fiber drops were capable of 1gbps. I got the impression they would have to install different switches though.
Re:Hope they start using bittorrent (Score:3, Interesting)
They have their own slashdot [slashdot.jp] too..