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The Internet Networking

US Internet Offers 10Gbps Fiber In Minneapolis 110

Posted by samzenpus from the greased-lightning dept.
An anonymous reader writes Christmas came early in Minneapolis! U.S. Internet has announced that they are now offering 10 Gbps service to all of their existing fiber customers. Their prior top tier service was 1 Gbps. The article also goes on to state that they're actively working on rolling out 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps fiber service as well."
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US Internet Offers 10Gbps Fiber In Minneapolis More

US Internet Offers 10Gbps Fiber In Minneapolis

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  • 10Gbps? I'll take 100 Mbps, shit I'll even take 50

  • Death to Monopolies (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You mean this wasn't pioneered by AT&T or Comcast or Verizon, etc?

    But I thought they were on our side?

  • How fast is just too fast? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by swb ( 14022 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @04:24PM (#48668907)

    Assuming you're not running major data service out of your house, what's the point of diminishing return for connectivity?

    I'm making the assumptions that the link speed you're sold is actually the speed you get and that there are no resource constraints, artificial or real, that would stop you from utilizing the maximum bandwidth.

    Do most web sites have per-connection caps on how fast any one connection can download files or data? Could you mount a file store on AWS or any other cloud storage provider and use it like a local NAS disk?

    • Most top websites are just running large arrays of cheap hardware behind load balancers and the majority of websites are on shared/virtual hosting. The problem with ultra-fast residential connections is that most servers can't saturate it.

      Assuming that you connect to servers that can saturate it, SATA3 is only 6Gbps so it would actually have more throughput than a typical SSD but your latency would be much higher.

    • Re:How fast is just too fast? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @05:18PM (#48669307)

      Assuming you're not running major data service out of your house, what's the point of diminishing return for connectivity?

      That would depend on the price, wouldn't it? If the marginal cost of 10 Gbps vs 1 Gbps is negligible, by all means, provide 10 Gbps. 10 Gbps ethernet over copper (for use within the residence to be able to take advantage of this speed) is still at the margins in terms of price, but that's mostly for the same reasons that 1 Gbps was so expensive for so long. If only "enterprise" uses it, it stays expensive, because business, as always, charges all the traffic will bear, and business customers like to pay more because they think that means they're getting something valuable.

      Once residences started using 1 Gbps, the price dropped and dropped and dropped and now you can get a very good quality 24 port 1 Gbps ethernet switch for less than $100. 10 Gbps will follow the same trajectory, but the demand has to be there. This is the first move towards creating that demand.

      Other people have pointed out that the server side won't talk to you at 10 Gbps anyway. You're throttled by the server at far lower than that. I've pointed it out myself for the past few years. But we know that the backbone bandwidth is in the ground, unlit, to support far higher outbound throughput from data centers. There's just no demand, and it saves on server hardware. Again, this is a move towards creating demand.

      Somebody has to be first, and it has to be on the demand side. This is one of the first, at least in the US.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      The question is if your diminishing return is less than their diminishing return. My impression is that with fiber connections you have a fairly high cost just because they need to maintain a fiber line, end point equipment, maintenance, service, support, billing and so on. From there they usually offer huge leaps in speed for relatively modest price gains, often like double the speed for 15-20% price gains and that shit multiplies. I could pay about 75% of my current rate to have 20 Mbit instead of 100 Mbi

    • I have 175 Mbps symmetric at home, and it's good enough for my purposes at the moment. Having reasonable upload bandwidth like that with 3 ms ping to the office is useful for exporting X apps to my work desktop (yes, I do that). It's nearly as fast as a local app to the point where I could forget it's remote.

      The decent upload is also really handy for doing remote backups. I have ISCSI targets in distant locations that I simply mount and use like a local file system. ISCSI without reasonable upload capacity

  • I wanna know when *I* am going to get an internet connection worth a tinker's damn!

  • Can't wait to replace CenturyLink (Score:5, Informative)

    by eaddict ( 148006 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @04:27PM (#48668925)

    My daughter goes to UofMN and has a very painful 1Mb service in her apartment for $30/month! CL says they are looking to improve the offerings in her building but she is not holding her breath. We haven't been told we can NOT get other service BUT there is currently no other service in her area. No monopoly you say? Wish this service would work its way around the University.

    • She can't get cable ?

    • I'm just over the border in Wisconsin and CenturyLink is my only wired choice too. They supposedly give us a 2M down/768K up connection, but I never have seen it. And they keep telling us that upgrades will be coming soon. They're actually not taking any more subscribers right now, due to saturation.

      So I ended up getting rid of CL and just using a small hotspot for casual browsing. My neighbor does let me still use his CL connection via WiFi when I want to do anything big (like ISOs, and videos) though. O

  • I am having a hard time coming up with anyone that could take advantage of this. I would love gig coverage in my area. Even then, 80% of my internet activity happens on wireless which will not even come close to using 1Gbps let alone 10Gbps. On my wired connections, I occasionally hit my max of 50Mbps but, in most situations, the far end is still a limiter.

    Large / medium business, sure. But a household of 4-6 people? Every one of them could be watching their own 4k content while simultaneously downl
    • Exactly. My home router is only 100 Mbps because i bought it a few year back and that's all they had for a decent price. None of my computers have 10 Gbps network cards in them. A quick google shows that a 10 Gbps network card costs around $400. Mind you I could run 10 computers, each at 1 Gbps, but I don't see how I would possibly use such a connection at home. I don't think I could really saturate 1 Gbps connection for any appreciable length of time. Even on my 30 Mbps connection we can stream multiple

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Shados ( 741919 )

        right, but computers and end user network hardware is easy to replace over the year. The last mile wires aren't. So its nice to have around for when the technology arrives. The hard part will have been done.

    • And that's a good thing.

    • Re:Who is this for? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Matheus ( 586080 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @04:48PM (#48669065) Homepage

      It's called a philosophy change. We've been living under the current regime of minimal service just barely eeked up every few years always far behind what was capable and being told to take it or leave it (with no real option to leave to).

      This is a company giving us far more than we need or want for a fairly reasonable cost. Yes most of their customers won't use that (or buy that... $400 a month is a bit pricy for your average home's internet needs) but compared to the Comcast/CenturyLink habits of overselling oversubscribed lines with not enough bandwidth for too much money and I'll take it!

      My only complaint is they are staying south of Downtown. I live in NE Minneapolis and, at the moment, can't even get the CenturyLink service I used to have in South (I had 40/20 and now am relegated to 12M/860K... the DL is ok but that upload is *painful*)

        Someday...

    • People will find ways to use it. I remember multiple points in my life where I would get some new piece of technology (RAM, CPU speed, disk space, bandwidth, etc.) and remark that I couldn't possibly utilize it fully. Inevitably, I always reached a point where I was not only utilizing it, but I was aching for more.

      A good historical example is streaming video. I never imagined watching movies and TV shows online when I had a 14.4 Kbps modem as a kid. Once broadband became popular, however, everyone start

      • One thing that could immediately become mainstream in the future: nightly, off-site backups. Transferring 1 TB of data over a 10Gbps line takes just under 15 minutes [wolframalpha.com].

        Forget the fiber connection, I want a terrabyte data store that reads at 10Gbps!

      • One thing that could immediately become mainstream in the future: nightly, off-site backups. Transferring 1 TB of data over a 10Gbps line takes just under 15 minutes.

        Off site backups is already mainstream, you don't do a full backup every day, that is silly...

        Carbonite, Backblaze, Crashplan, etc. all offer unlimited backup that works just fine today.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nr ( 27070 )

        Yes, and some people host websites at home with decent traffic or sell/rent virtual servers to other people. 1 Gbit doesn't really cope with that.

        A friend of mine have a two node OpenStack cluster with around 20-50 machines and containers running, selling IaaS capacity from his home.

        If you have a large website or semi-commercial cloud operation it would still be cheaper buying a 10 Gbit connection than hosting the machines externally.

        But this is special cases of course, regular Joe's doesn't have much use f

    • Large / medium business, sure. But a household of 4-6 people?

      I don't really think the service is aimed at residential customers, not at $400/month. That's dirt cheap for businesses though.

  • Ie what is the ping round trip time to the ISP's router ? With an interactive protocol/application round trip time is as important as bandwidth.

  • Data cap? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Progress for the ISP. Now their customes can hit their data cap in the first 10 minutes of the month!

  • That's just the signalling rate. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @05:02PM (#48669183) Homepage Journal

    Are they guaranteeing throughput? Then it's meaningless for most folks. It's like putting tires rated for 200 MPH on your care and assuming it will now go 200 MPH.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shados ( 741919 )

      At this point it doesn't matter. If it can stream netflix without resorting to customer extortion, its better than the alternative, in the US (which is just sad...)

  • Now what's AT&T's story? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xzeroed ( 3962537 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @05:13PM (#48669267)
    So much for AT&T claiming that new net neutrality rules would financially hinder them from building out their fiber network!! If this tiny little company can role out 10 Gbps service, offer 1 Gbps service for $65/month, and be actively engaged on getting 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps rolled out in Minneapolis without having to charge companies like Netflix additional fees, then why can't a behemoth like AT&T do the same??

    • Part of it is because they're only rolled out to about 10 blocks of some of the most expensive homes in Minneapolis. With that said, hopefully they'll succeed and eventually get fiber out to the 'burbs.

  • Horrendous slap in the face to many who struggle to get anything useful. It would be nice to see the big players cut back on their FUD and actually provide the services their customers need at a fair price (novel concept).

    We are lucky to have gotten 30/5 Mbps for $35 a month, the price shot up for the 50 and 100 Mbps tiers. However, having a big (or huge) pipe does almost no good when the backbone is puny compared to the need and we all sloooow down in the evening...

  • They are using an ethernet solution over fiber so the next steps above 10 are 40 and 100 gig. This is what you can do when you roll out a data network and not an overgrown cable tv network like all the xPON and FTTH, FTTP networks we keep hearing about.

  • While it's great to get super-fast Internet, we may run into a big problem soon: many web server farms may not have the bandwidth capacity to handle many millions of users who have above 100 megabit/second download speed Internet access at the "last mile" connection. It's going to require a major upgrade of content delivery networks to handle much faster connection end users.

  • I was lucky enough to have access to a home hookup on a lower USI tier for a while. It was of course far and away the best Internets around locally (altho now it's prompted CenturyLink to roll out). Coverage maps here http://fiber.usinternet.com/ [usinternet.com]

    Another thing I loved was Comcast was forced to slash its rates in the covered zip codes dramatically, finally resembling a reasonable price. The solid upstream is very good for getting videos online, altho its true that the chokepoint winds up being the Youtube ser

  • ...we just write out the individual bits on a post it note, throw it out the window and let the wind blow it to the nearest exchange, where trained koalas use 1800's era telegraph equipment to re-encode the traffic onto the Internet, for us. Because that's faster than the best Internet most of us will ever see.

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