How Far Will You Go For Highest Speed Internet?

Zecheus (1072058) writes "This community is extraordinarily rural. It is considered among the northernmost in the world. In the summer, temperature rises as high as 40F. There are more polar bears than humans. Even the usual ubiquitous and generous Norwegian health care is out of reach: inhabitants leave for the south to give birth or to die. On the other hand, it enjoys the highest quality Internet experience in the world due to recently installed fiber. Care to give it a try? By the way, the area has a turnover rate of over 25% every year."

So how fast is it...?

[QRDeNameland]

How do you write an article about the "highest speed internet" in the world without a single quantification of how fast it actually is?

Back in my day

[alta]

I remember how happy I was the first time I had cable internet. I was beta testing for comcast. Free for the first 6 months. So exciting. Now, I'm old (37) and bandwidth doesn't excite me the way it used to. I'm paying for 10MB I get 12MB... I could get up to 100, but why bother. I come home, sit on my couch and have a beer. The kids can and I can play all the minecraft we want on that 12MB connection.

How far? Not very...

[fustakrakich]

Eventually it will come to me. Every couple of years I get a free upgrade as the pipe gets fatter. I can wait.

One part conveniently left out

[Kjella]

One part conveniently left out is the military's part in this, they want fiber optics for a bunch of NATO surveillance activities, polar satellites and so on. It's pretty obvious why if you look at a map [unep.org]. Supplying the about 2600 permanent inhabitants with really fast broadband (100% fiber optics now) is just a side effect. True, this cabin area about 3 miles from the main settlement wasn't originally included in the plans, but when the inhabitants dig the ditch and all the fiber company has to do is roll out the cable drum it's a pretty good deal for them too. There are several rural areas - though not quite that remote - here in Norway which has done the digging as a community effort to make the cost bearable for the fiber company. Just last quarter the median broadband in Norway passed 10 Mbit/s, the mean is 18.4 Mbit/s and improving at a nice pace.

Re:Size of the pipe.

[CastrTroy]

Exactly. High speed connections aren't any good if your ping times are terrible because you're so far away from civilization. Also, once you get up around 100 mbit/s, it doesn't really matter how fast the connection is. At that point you could stream more than a few HD movies. Let us also not forget that many spinning platter drives have sustained write speeds of less than 100 MB per second, which means that as you approach gigabit speeds, you network connection actually exceeds the speed you can write the data to disk.

Re:Back in my day

[asylumx]

Bandwidth doesn't really matter after a certain point

Also, 640k will be enough for anyone!

Re:Chattanooga

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the polar bears will be better neighbors.