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Networking Communications The Internet Hardware

100Mbps Home Internet Service Next Year in Finland 313

Posted by timothy from the helluva-commute dept.
Listen Up writes "According to an article on CNN, broadband Internet access via cable modems in Finland will be able to hit 100 Mbps as early as 2006. That would be 50 times faster than the average broadband speeds now offered to cable TV homes in Finland. Do you think this technology has the possibility of reaching U.S. shores? Or do you think the already deeply entrenched U.S. politics are going to keep this technology from ever reaching us? There are already thousands and thousands of miles of 'dark fiber' underground around the U.S."
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100Mbps Home Internet Service Next Year in Finland More

100Mbps Home Internet Service Next Year in Finland

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  • What is the (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mingot ( 665080 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:10PM (#13119183)
    What's the upload speed?
    • I'd be more concerned with hitting your download limit for the month in under an hour.
    • For a fucking cable company, and when I used to be able to receive/download (send/upload always sucked) huge files.

      But this is on par with dial up.

      I am NOT spending $60USD/month for this. If it wasn't too late to get in touch with a human being, I'd let them know that dollar for dollar, they aren't worth it and they CAN be replaced.

  • Motorola is helping Singapore with the same tech (Score:3, Informative)

    by Stefman ( 37546 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:10PM (#13119184)
    So I assume that these speeds would be possible if Moto partners with a cable company in the states.

  • Nice! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sweetdelight ( 895373 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:11PM (#13119189)
    I wish I lived there..And if the fibre doesn't have Caps, That would sweeten the deal.

    • Re:Nice! (Score:2, Funny)

      by ChrisZermatt ( 892665 )
      I'd like to live there for the *very* hot women -- fast internet isn't going to make me move anywhere!
    • if the fibre doesn't have Caps

      You'd poke your eye out. Always terminate fibre, and always wear eye protection.

  • why is this news? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:12PM (#13119200)
    100Mbps fiber to door was available in Japan since like two years ago; about a year ago in metropolitan areas they even rolled out 1Gbps service. Finland makes the news because...?
    • We're pinin' for the fjords?
    • This is news, because it's 100Mbps over cable ... unless that is, Japan is doing the same, and not over fiber

    • Re:why is this news? (Score:5, Informative)

      by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:49PM (#13119520)
      Finland makes the news because...?
      because it offers the promise of 100 mbps over existing TV cables. That is the key right there, because it means the masses (most of us) might actually benefit.

      Of course if you live in a single-broadband-provider city like I do, it's hard to imagine why they'd bother.

    • Getting some facts right:

      NTT's "B Flet's" service (100 Mbps FTTH) has been in trial phase since December 2000 and was launched in August 2001, so that's more like 4 years ago.

      See this press release [ntt-west.co.jp].

      As for 1 Gbps, let's not get too excited: I too was jumping up and down, until I realized it was a shared line, and all you get in the end anyway is 100 Mbps, as this little picture [ntt-east.co.jp] shows.

    • 100Mbps fiber to door was available in Japan since like two years ago; about a year ago in metropolitan areas they even rolled out 1Gbps service. Finland makes the news because...?

      Because everyone knows that japanese have super-advanced technology - they actually built a battle suit [gravitoncity.com] that allowed its wearer to take on Superman's daughter.

      On the other hand, such an achievement is nothing short of heroic in Finland - laying down the cable below permafrost in the middle of a snowstorm is difficult enough

  • I already get 4Mbps downstream from Time Warner of San Diego and it is plenty!
    • For those who truly plan Online games... there is no such thing as plenty. Not to mention the server is always slowed down by that 1 guy on a 56k modem anyways.

    • I already get 4Mbps downstream from Time Warner of San Diego and it is plenty!

      Is this something that we can quote you on in 10 years?

      Truth is while 5Mbps may be enough now, it certainly won't be in 5 years. If you look at the increasing size of application downloads, the improving quality of video online, games and IP telephony, and maybe even eventually video telephony, and even applications we haven't heard of yet because of bandwith limitations, then 4Mbps is going to be tight.

  • Possibility of reaching U.S. shores? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:13PM (#13119213)
    I don't think any cat5e can reach that long.

  • Dark Fiber (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BlogPope ( 886961 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:13PM (#13119214)
    There are already thousands and thousands of miles of 'dark fiber' underground around the U.S."

    Dark Fiber as nothing to do with home broadband. if it were between your house and the ISP, you might have something, but its not. The trick is getting high speed connections where Fiber doesn't exist.

  • I think its unfair to compare these kind of rollouts to the US on a general scale. The US is practically the size of europe, and due to the state demarkations has almost the scaling problems that deploying across europe would incur (although the same core infrastructure providers would help somewhat). This isn't to say some providers aren't trying, there's definitely been a push towards fiber services as the next generation by some US providers. As for me, I'm just hoping that the UK gets its act together a

  • Benchmarking (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hattan ( 869918 )
    "Based on our research, 30 megabits per second is the absolute minimum in future homes" I wonder what kind of tests they used to determine that figure.
    • Simple... Standard user downloads approximatly one hour of pron per day, encoded in "scrunched" divx = around 400mb then add 600mb of DRM, and you end up with a "user required download" or URD of 1 gig... The average user will complain if a movie that they are paying for takes longer to download than to watch (or at least will do when they're on supposedly "SUPER-FAST-AmazingLine"), so you've got to get it to them in around a hour. 30mbit/sec = approx 300kb/sec actual download = approx 18mb/minute or around
    • 640*480*3*30= 27,648,000 Mbits/sec

      duh?

  • Dark fiber... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Faust7 ( 314817 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:15PM (#13119228) Homepage
    There are already thousands and thousands of miles of 'dark fiber' underground around the U.S.

    So that's where all the dark matter is.

  • Obligatory Monty Python (Score:3, Funny)

    by wootest ( 694923 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:15PM (#13119231)
    Finland, Finland, Finland
    The country where I want to be

  • Not fully usable, obviously (Score:5, Informative)

    by Peter Cooper ( 660482 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:18PM (#13119255) Homepage Journal
    Having 100Mbps would be great, but it's not as if you're going to be able to pull files off of some Web server at the full speed. Many busy servers only have 100Mbps connectivity in total themselves.

    You might suggest that 100Mbps would be great for BitTorrent and the like, but the flaw is that ISP's backbones and peering arrangements are measured in gigabits, not terabits. Even an OC-48 can only take 24 customers maxing out their bandwidth on this system. A big European ISP like Demon only has 2Gbps going into the LINX.. enough for, wow, 20 customers to max out their bandwidth.

    The ratio of guaranteed bandwidth to advertised bandwidth on this offering is crazy. Backbones just aren't there yet.
    • The whole "technology X has lots of bandwidth!" thing is silly anyway. DOCSIS (Cable Modems) go up to 10Mbps. Who has 10Mbps cable? Nobody. You're lucky to get 3Mbps for less than $100 a month. If you want higher speeds, you will pay through the nose.

      So, customers buying this "100Mbps" service will probably get 10Mbps tops unless they can pay $1000 a month and have a first-born son to sell.
      • Not to mention the snappy upload speeds.. when you pay that $1000 a month, they'll upgrade from 124kbps to 384kbps at no additional charge. WOW!
      • "Who has 10Mbps cable? Nobody."

        Cogeco Cable (in Ontario) provides 10Mbps cable for just over $50/month, and I get just under 7Mbps with Rogers for $45/month ...
        • You guys are making me sad... check out my prices: http://cableone.net/internet/plans.asp [cableone.net]

          $100/mo for 4Mbps. Cableone is the only provider in my area, and I can't even get DSL. :(
          • Yep you should be sad. Time Warner upgraded the local cable speeds to 5Mbps. I've hit about 4.5Mbit on 3 connections to a usenet news server - which ain't half bad. My cost is $40/month if you have cable TV service, or $50/month if you don't.
            Of course on Cable speeds vary with neighborhood congestion - you sure don't have dedicated bandwidth. In some areas throughput is worse than others. DSL starts here at about $30/month for 1.5Mbps
            Upload speeds suck either way, with cable at 384kbps and DSL at 128kbps.

    • Re:Not fully usable, obviously (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      enough for, wow, 20 customers to max out their bandwidth.

      You assume that all of the content they want is not in Finland.

      You assume wrong. There is plenty to see and do, and all you need to make use of it with bittorrent is a number of other people on this service in Finland in the swarm with you. Throw in being able to play your FPS against your local friends while downloading stuff in the background without the latency hit that causes on DSL, and you start seeing where this is going.

      You may be right,
    • Backbones just aren't there yet.
      Now you know why they mentioned all that dark fiber in the summary, eh?

      Bulking up the backbone is easy. It's the last mile that's hard. It's unwise to worry about the backbone, or allow it to restrict the last mile network.

    • A big European ISP like Demon only has 2Gbps going into the LINX.. enough for, wow, 20 customers to max out their bandwidth.

      Yeah, there is a 50 times wider band. This means that those 20 customers will also be finished 50 times faster, freeing up bandwidth for the next batch of 20 customers.

      Point: For the same content, nothing changes. Some customers will just have their content served faster. Just because your network is 50 times faster, you're not going to view 50 times more pages on CNN.com.

      For new c
    • unless they use Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing. Then they could probably fit 196 or so customers. At a large cost.

  • bandwidth cross borders? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Raleel ( 30913 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:18PM (#13119260)
    Anyone know what Finland has actually has for pipes into the country? 100Mbps is nice, but if you want international content, it might not be such a big deal

    • Re:bandwidth cross borders? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      There's NORDUNET's 10 Gbps to Stockholm, and EUNET (KPN) has two 2.5 Gbps links, to Hamburg and Stockholm. All of that could now be saturated by merely 150 cable customers... there's no way they won't have transfer caps.
      • Finland's pretty heavily wired to Sweden and mainland Europe. And if they're all trying to suck down content from outside Finland at the same time, that just means they hit bottlenecks on the international on inter-city links instead of the last kilometer link; they're still sharing as much bandwidth. Also, many of the reasons you'd want links that fast are because the ISPs want to sell you television (in case you RTFA), which from a data standpoint is locally generated and probably broadcast-mode (even i
    • The university network, FUNET [www.csc.fi], has 10Gbps. In addition several other ISPs have their own backbone lines out of the country. Some of them are listed at the Finnish Communication and Internet Exchange [ficix.fi] (look at the statistics). I have no idea what the total bandwith of all these operators is.

  • Meanwhile in japan .... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mxpengin ( 516866 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:19PM (#13119265) Homepage
    I have this FTH service in japan since last month and is very nice ... my only complain is that is very hard to get high transmition rates with the service... only if you are using things in japan . The cost is about 80 dollars a month and television services can be used on demand ( for a fee of course ). A link in english to my provider [ocn.ne.jp].
    • Same story here. I paid approximately USD$10 for the upgrade from 8 MB/s (the lowest my internet company would let me buy) to 50 MB/s but have never achieved download speeds in excess of 1 MB/s because I'm always limited by the other side's pipe. I suppose if I used file sharing software it would be more useful. On the other hand, it IS nice to saturate the connection for WoW patches :)

  • The problem is the last mile... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:25PM (#13119319)
    There are already thousands and thousands of miles of 'dark fiber' underground around the U.S.

    So what? The problem is not bandwidth in total, it is making the connection to the home to the nearest big fiber point. DSL and cable are popular with ISPs because the cables already go to the customer. Running broadband over a phone line or cable costs next to nothing. The big cost was digging up the street to put in the wire. After that, the operating costs are minimal.

    If you go to a big US colocation facility, you will find that a lot of bandwidth is really cheap, because the fiber is already there. If you want a fiber connection to your home, you will have to pay an arm and a leg to put the fiber in the ground.

    Wireless ISPs have a big potential advantage since they can avoid the last mile problem.
    • The problem is not bandwidth in total, it is making the connection to the home to the nearest big fiber point. DSL and cable are popular with ISPs because the cables already go to the customer. Running broadband over a phone line or cable costs next to nothing. The big cost was digging up the street to put in the wire.
      And yet, the cable companies managed to do just that in pretty short order. Why is Fiber To The Premises any different?

  • That's what I'm getting _today_. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mdn ( 61636 ) on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:28PM (#13119351)
    Well, not really. But I could be getting it if I wasn't too cheap.

    100 MBit Internet access (both ways) is offered to apartment owners in a number of Swedish towns. This costs about 76 USD a month.

    As I said before, I'm too cheap to pay for that, so I'm paying for a throttled version (10 MBit/s) of the same service putting me back about 40 USD a month.

    The service has been offered for quite a few years by a company called Bredbandsbolaget [bredband.net]. (The site is in a strange foreign language though. Be warned.)

    • I have a 10Mbps full duplex fiber at home paying 298SEK or around 40USD a month from Jämtkraft/ZedNet. At work, I have a 24/1Mbps ADSL with a static public IP from Bredbandsbolaget for roughly the same price. Both of them work just fine.

  • Skeptical (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WhiteWolf666 ( 145211 ) <<sherwin> <at> <amiran.us>> on Wednesday July 20, 2005 @07:31PM (#13119371) Homepage Journal
    1. Article says 100 Mbps is 50 times faster than what they have now. Thus, they have 2 Mbps cable.

    2. I have 6 Mbps cable. I know people within 20-30 miles of me with 8 or 10 Mbps cable. SBC delivers 3 Mbps dsl, and delivered 6 Mbps to a select few quick enough to jump on the deal.

    Does anyone else find it hard to believe that they will leapfrog technologies like that? Or, that even once those companies start selling the equipment (the article, after all, quotes an equipment manufacturer, *not* an ISP) that deployment will be instant?

    VDSL, VDSL2, and a whole bunch of alphabet soup DSL types exist *right* now, but we don't see them all over the U.S.

    Similarly, many American cable companies have switched much of their equipment to DOCSIS 2.0 stuff, but haven't ramped up the speeds yet (not enough backhaul).

    Avaliability of equipment != deployment. Rather than idolizing some vaporware Finish deployment, we should be looking at places like S. Korea and Japan, where they've managed 2 and 3 digit broadband speeds (in Mbps) *now*, not some-time-in-the-oh-so-near-future.

    I can pull up 100s of articles from SBC's Project Lightspeed, or Verizon's FIOS. Some of them talk about deploying this stuff nationwide in 2003-2004.

    But do I have 100 Mbps internet yet? No.

    This is a non-article. A fluff piece by an equipment manufacturer. I want to hear more about actual deployments (and they do exist), not about some companies wishful thinking.
    • Bandwidth is an interesting issue I'm diving into currently. I just got hired on by a telephone company who's primary mission is servicing rural markets and a lot of new developments are getting FTTP (Fiber to the Premisis) from the get go. Speeds are ~200MBit and it appears they are trying to expand the telephone network to include TV content, Internet and Telephone services. It is in the US now, but only in places that are being built new now.

      It is a fluff piece. We've had the ability to do this for

    • 1. Article says 100 Mbps is 50 times faster than what they have now. Thus, they have 2 Mbps cable.

      2. I have 6 Mbps cable. I know people within 20-30 miles of me with 8 or 10 Mbps cable. SBC delivers 3 Mbps dsl, and delivered 6 Mbps to a select few quick enough to jump on the deal.

      Does anyone else find it hard to believe that they will leapfrog technologies like that? Or, that even once those companies start selling the equipment (the article, after all, quotes an equipment manufacturer, *not* an ISP) th

  • There's no way this going to be widespread in one year, it's at least 3 years out if anyone decides to really adopt it. It would require completly abandoning existing CMTS systems (Cable modem termination system) and adopting and entirely different technology. Docsis 3.0 is the future of cable, this could possibly get some use as a secondary system for businesses where a fiber build isn't possible but not as a replacement to current cable modems. Hell the support contracts alone will likely take several
    • Sorry to respond to myself but I should have added in my previous comment that I'm refering to this technology being adopted in the USA.
    • Mod the parent up! The original story is a puff piece, designed, I suspect, to help the company sell stock.

      The cable industry has standards for cable modems, called DOCSIS. DOCSIS 1.x speeds are basically up to 30 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps (more often less) upstream. That's common now. DOCSIS 2.0 speed goes to 40/30. That's in production now, being phased in. DOCSIS 3.0 is basically outlined but not yet final -- no products until 2006 or later -- and it combines TV channels (analog bandwidth) in or

  • 100mbit is here (Score:2, Informative)

    by isecore ( 132059 )
    Here in Sweden one of the biggest ISP's (called Bredbandsbolaget or "The Broadband Company" in English) have been offering 100mbits Internet for the better part of a year now.

    Admittedly it's only to their fiber/LAN-customers (which I am a part of) and with a traffic cap at 300GB/month as well as a rather hefty pricetag of approx US$113/month.

    But it's available to the crazies who want it.
  • I was offered 100Mbps fdx two years ago, but I turned it down since my equipment was only able to handle 10Mbps and the pricing was considerably higher for the 100Mbps.

    Another item to consider is also the fact that it is often the other end or the network that is the limit.

  • Or do you think the already deeply entrenched U.S. politics are going to keep this technology from ever reaching us?

    Nah. There is a lot of ultrabroadband activity in progress in the US already. Cablevision is beta testing 20 Mb/s service in Metro NY, and Verizon is deploying FIOS which is offering up to 30 Mbps, with future plans for 100 Mbps. Plus the FCC has stated that their #1 goal is to increase broadband use in the US.

    Right now I have 10 Mbps over cable and find it to be pretty good in terms of raw
  • I don't know the rest of the world, but Hong Kong has 1G bps home broadband [hkbn.net] , now, by using IEEE 802.3z Gigabit Ethernet, over Fiber directly to home users.

    Don't wait for 100Mbps, 1000Mbps is there already. :)
  • My cable modem gets exactly 6 mbit/sec down, not because of technology limitations, but because the service provider caps it there. Roadrunner does this too. And they cap the upstream bandwidth significantly lower. If they're already artificially capping the speed below the technological limitations, what's the point of a system that's capable of being faster?

    --
    watch funny commercials [tubespot.com]
  • Every upgrade around the world for broadband helps EVERYBODY who uses Bittorrent (due to increased upload speeds)...so....I root (no pun) for ANY upgrade for everybody :)

  • I upgraded to 3Mbps recently (and I don't seem to be getting it but that's another story), and the rep told me they're running fiber everywhere to offer 20Mbps within the next twelve months. We'll see.

    I doubt we'll see 100Mbps here until there's fiber to the curb. At $250,000 or whatever it is per quarter mile, that could take a while.

  • News? (Score:2)

    by Suhas ( 232056 )
    We have had 100 MBPS Broadband available almnost all over Tokyo and Osaka in Japan for over an year now.
  • Bredbandsbolaget [bredband.net] in Sweden has offered 100 MBit connections for some time. The price works out to about $75 USD per month.
  • RTFA.

    Small-cap Finnish

    broadband equipment manufacturer Teleste -- said it would early next year bring to the market its ethernet-to-home product, which will give consumers access to 100Mb/s speed.

    No finnish cable tv operator has yet announced it would by such a product.

    Presentation about this thing at http://www.goodmood.net/teleste_vg_preview/pres2/T eleste_2.html [goodmood.net]

  • Sweden has had 100 MBit (full duplex) home Internet connections for a long time, at least since four years. The news here is that some homes are getting full gigabit connections, also full duplex, servers allowed.

    What's the next story up, something about DSL and cable penetration (which are also 20th century technology)?
    • Ah, so the news was 100Mbit modulation over DSL, not that there were 100Mbit connections to homes. I stand corrected...
  • Optimum Online is already testing a 100mbps system to see if they're going to roll it out. Right now they're only running it around 50mbps. I believe the pilot project is in Smithtown, out on Long Island.
  • I've been using the same 10 Mb hub for my home network since the mid-90s. Would this mean I have to upgrade?
  • People commonly under-estimate the size of Finland. It's actually larger than most people think: about 1200 km from north to south (750 miles), which is roughly equal to the distance from San Francisco to Seattle. The area is 338000 sq km (130000 sq miles), which is larger than all other US states but Alaska, Texas, California and Montana. Put another way, Finland is twice the size of Florida.

    Many people seem to think that a country that is twice the size as another would naturally take twice as long to de

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