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The Internet Network Networking Stats

Gigabit Internet Access Now Supported By 84 US ISPs 120

An anonymous reader writes: According to Michael Render, principal analyst at market researcher RVA LLC, 83 Internet access providers have joined Google to offer gigabit Internet access service (all priced in the $50-$150 per month range).Render's data shows that new subscribers are signing up at an annualized growth rate of 480 percent each year. That "annualized" is an important thing to note, though; this is early days, and adding a few households, relatively speaking, means an impressive percentage change.
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Gigabit Internet Access Now Supported By 84 US ISPs

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  • by gavron ( 1300111 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @04:49AM (#50180195)

    The article summary needs to specify that it's about offering RESIDENTIAL service. Thousands of ISPs offer gigabit Internet access in datacenters and businesses all over the US. 84 of them also reach the home.

    Of note - ALL current US ISPs offering RESIDENTIAL gigabit service do so on the oversell model, such that they CAN deliver UP TO 1Gbps to a customer, but likely will be delivering less as they share upstream bandwidth across facilities, areas, and customers. This is not a Bad Thing -- it's how the costs are leveraged across multiple residential customers so it is 7-10x lower than business-grade gigabit service.

    This is a really great thing!

    E

    • It is in theory... However right now I am not seeing the need for it. I am currently at 10-15mbs about 100x slower... I am able to stream HD video, while browsing the web at the same time. Unlike the old days of dial up when I started at 2400bps and even when I went to 14.4k and 28.8k even when I got to college and we had about 1-5mbs It was a point where we wanted more speed. However now unless I am downloading the latest Linux/BSD distribution ISO that I feel like playing with. It doesn't feel slow or

      • For me, video calling would be the thing I'd expect to improve significantly with higher speed access. But higher speed doesn't mean equivalently lower latency, and latency improvement is really what I want.
        • by guruevi ( 827432 )

          Try putting in a (Tomato/OpenWRT/DD-WRT) router and enable the fq_codel (or a similar) QoS algorithm - Multiple video streams, torrenting, surfing and video calling at the same time all became much better/possible.

      • by Shinobi ( 19308 )

        I'm at 100Mbit/s nominal(110 down 105 up actual), and for my family, sometimes we actually congest it badly, especially now that the kids are getting older.

        The ability to download a game at 80Mbit/s while there are 4 different HD streams going etc is a boon, for example. Or being able to send friends, family or work large files without needing an hour.

        • Your problem isn't the capacity, you have more than enough. You just need to prioritize access to the network. I don't see why a file download or upload should be done in seconds, that's not a priority task in any way and it can be send in background without disturbing any live sreaming. You just don't use your network wisely. Getting more bandwith will not fix this, you will still congest the network, but for shorter period of time until you will want to download/upload larger and larger files, etc.
          • by Shinobi ( 19308 )

            A file download and upload can certainly be a priority task, like for example sending my father a clip of something at the same time I'm talking to him about what I've filmed, for example.

            But it's also a convenience thing: As it is now, we can now decide on a movie we want to watch and then go and make tea, and when we get back, it's ready to watch, while with your approach, we'd have to schedule it hours or days ahead, which is just head-up-your-ass retarded.

            Also, capacity reduces the time it takes to inst

          • by Kjella ( 173770 )

            Your problem isn't the capacity, you have more than enough. You just need to prioritize access to the network.

            That's the wrong end to start in, if removing the resource limitation is trivial [thedailywtf.com] that's a better solution than any resource management system, whether good or bad. At least if you're fixing this problem for you and not rolling out a resource-gobbling solution to a million devices. Before lots of applications running at the same time would trash the disk, with an SSD I just don't care since at >10000 IOPS it serves everything at once. The side effect is of course that I'm becoming more indifferent to inef

          • by Bengie ( 1121981 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @12:43PM (#50181519)

            I don't see why a file download or upload should be done in seconds

            Years sound fine to me. Why do we even need to communicate in the first place? The quicker the better, within reason. 1Gb/s is cheap, 10Gb is still expensive, but not for long. There's no reason we should have the fastest cheap networks.

      • Think of the Advertisers! Without gigabit residential service, how can they add all that garbage to useful content?!

    • "... the oversell model ... CAN deliver UP TO..."

      At OSCON 2015 last week, I talked with several people about technology companies being wildly mis-managed and very poorly communicated.

      There is apparently no "Gigabit" service. "Gigabit" only refers to the electrical connection speed. The real speed of actual data delivery is whatever the providers want it to be.

      My experience is that speedtest.net [speedtest.net] exaggerates the actual speed of delivery. Numion [numion.com] is realistic.
      • by Shinobi ( 19308 )

        I found that Numion did not realistically measure my connection. In fact, when I do manual tests of my own, I easily reach 110Mbit/s on actual transfers(downloaded a game from GOG for example), at 15:09 Swedish time on a saturday, on a nominally 100Mbit/s connection. Upload, I get 105Mbit/s. However, running the Numion tests, it claims I only get 1Mbit/s.

        • That's interesting. I've seen situations like that, also.

          My guess is that someone else had already downloaded the same game, and it was being held on your ISPs hard drives. So, it wasn't actually being transferred over the internet.
          • by Shinobi ( 19308 )

            I don't know of a single ISP in Sweden that does that kind of caching. The only broadly similar thing I know of is ComHem with their NetFlix agreement, and in their case it's essentially stream relaying/reflection and not a fully local(to the ISP) cache.

          • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
            ISPs tat can do transparent HTTPS proxying? Cool, they've broken HTTPS or hacked your computers.
      • The real speed of actual data delivery is whatever the providers want it to be.

        Not entirely true. the real speed of actual data devliery depends on many factors including

        1: the speed of your client hardware and software
        2: the speed of your local network
        3: the speed of your customer premisis equipment
        4: any congestion/shaping/prioritisation on your ISPs network
        5: any congestion between your ISP and the server host.
        6: any congestion on the server hosts network
        7: the speed/congestion of the servers connection to it's hosts network
        8: the ability of the server itself to keep up
        9: TCP issue

        • Thanks for the list.

          "AFAICT speedtest measures the best case, it uses a nearby fast test server and it waits for the speed to stabilize to allow for TCP slow start." (slightly edited)

          Yes, SpeedTest.net [speedtest.net] is not giving information that reflects the actual user experience.
      • Just like it's always been with every other last mile technology. Having a DS3 doesn't mean that you're going to slurp Joe Sixpack's blog at 45Mbit/s.
      • by Cramer ( 69040 )

        Numion? That looks like something from the 80's. Java: Check. FRAMES: Big fat CHECK.

        And I'm sure various site admins love being selected by him as a traffic source. This alone makes his data completely unreliable -- who knows what state those selected sites are in at any given moment.

    • More than 84. My small local ISP offers it and they aren't on the list.

    • >> all priced in the $50-$150 per month range

      >> Of note - ALL current US ISPs offering RESIDENTIAL gigabit service do so on the oversell model, such that they CAN deliver UP TO 1Gbps to a customer,....

      No duh

    • by Bengie ( 1121981 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @01:16PM (#50181683)

      Of note - ALL current US ISPs offering RESIDENTIAL gigabit service do so on the oversell model, such that they CAN deliver UP TO 1Gbps to a customer

      My Midwest USA ISP sells 1Gb/s residential, and they do not say "up to". Instead they guarantee that you will not get congestion on their network or to their transit provider. I have called in on 10ms ping increased and they have fixed the issues. They take congestion spuriously.

      Taken from marketing
      1 Gbps Symmetrical. It’s dedicated symmetrical fiber so speeds never go down or change.

      Extremely large online backups
      Web hosting
      Webinar hosting
      Cloud computing
      Online gaming
      Uninterrupted HD streaming (Netflix, YouTube, Hulu)

      Taken from terms and conditions
      No Unreasonable Discrimination
      The Company does not unreasonably discriminate in its transmission of lawful traffic over the broadband Internet access services of its customers.

      The Company does not block, impair, degrade or delay VoIP applications or services that compete with its voice services and those of its affiliates.

      The Company does not block, impair, degrade, delay or otherwise inhibit access by its customers to lawful content, applications, services or non-harmful devices.

      The Company does not impair free expression by actions such as slowing traffic from particular websites or blogs.

      The Company does not use or demand “pay-for-priority” or similar arrangements that directly or indirectly favor some traffic over other traffic.

      The Company does not prioritize its own content, application, services, or devices, or those of its affiliates.

      The Company does not retain, store or provide customer traffic information, except as required by law under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      You think there is no oversell on business-grade or even carrier-grade bandwidth? Even in a datacenter, the bandwidth is oversold easily at 100:1, unless you're actively peering with someone (at which the point is moot) you're being oversold to an extent. If you want dedicated bandwidth between 2 points, you can typically get that at a 10x price point but that will still be on the same network but at the cost of someone else's bandwidth (residential or business-grade).

      Business-grade is typically just reside

      • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        Some people don't realize that even business grade is statistically multiplexed and not "dedicated" in the overly strict sense of not shared.
  • by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @04:53AM (#50180207)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <.moc.eeznerif.todhsals. .ta. .treb.> on Saturday July 25, 2015 @06:20AM (#50180329) Homepage

      Speedtest sites don't tell the whole story, especially at higher speeds...
      Some of the speedtest sites are only on 100mbit themselves, even those on gigabit are usually sharing the bandwidth at their end... And then there's peering, the interconnect between your isp and the speedtest site might not have 1gbit of free capacity at the time your testing. The end devices (or the software running on them) might also not be up to the 1gbps rate - lots of cheaper gigabit nics can't handle wire speed, long or bad cabling, flash based speedtest apps etc.

      I've had a box with 1gbps in a data centre for a few years now, and i can quite happily pull 1gbps doing torrent downloads and from some linux mirror sites, but i get a lot less from speedtest sites and many things download a lot slower because the other end or something in between can't handle it.

      You need to test a variety of different things, and at different times of the day...

    • by wbr1 ( 2538558 )
      How many servers can or will return those speeds? A big pipe is not just useful for a single point connection. Being able to have ten 100gbs connections simultaneously is a bigger thing.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
          Same thing over here. People only think most servers can't handle it because their ISP's peering sucks. I get 1Gb/s from nearly all main servers, Eve Online paths, Windows Patches, Blizzard, YouTube, Netflix, Twitch, Steam. Even during the 8p-11p rush.
    • by Shinobi ( 19308 )

      A friend of mine consistently gets high speeds both up and down on his 1gbit/s down/500Mbit/s up residential connection, here in Stockholm. He frequently does SCP/SFTP transfers to and from clients where he gets 900Mbit/s+ down and 480Mbit/s up, even during primetime. So it all depends on where you are, your ISP etc, and not generalize that just because ComCast and other US ISP's do something, the rest of the world is the same.

    • by bbn ( 172659 )

      Most speedtest servers are hosted on 1 gigabit/s which means you will probably never be able to get a clean 1 gigabit/s reading from those. That would require that you got the server all by yourself and that wont happen.

      We are an ISP that sell gigabit. We host our own speedtest.net server on a 10 gigabit/s. It might be considered "cheating" as the user will only be measuring our internal network. But there is simply no other speedtest server nearby that is able to give consistent good readings. There are a

      • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        It depends on who is running those 1Gb ports. If they're a company that does not stream bulk data, then their ports will probably never be at capacity anyway. Your customers will still get 1Gb/s speeds, but only for the fractions of a second it takes to transfer their small web pages.

        The company I work for only has a 2Gb connection to the Internet and hundreds of thousands of live connections at peak usage, yet our peak bandwidth is around 1.2Gb/s. Of course those 100K+, if they all had 1Gb connections co
  • Whats left unsaid... (Score:4, Informative)

    by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @06:14AM (#50180315)

    Whats left unsaid is how many ISPs (including those that dont yet exist except on paper or in someones head) would LIKE to offer super fast broadband but are unable to because local or state authorities have been convinced by dinosaur companies like Comcast and Time Warner to block alternative ISPs comming into the area and providing good access.

    If governments at all levels stopped listening to the dinosaur ISPs and their friends in Hollywood and started listening to the people who elected them, the number of people able to get gigabit service (or even just super fast service) might start to be a meaningful percentage of the total population.

    • by jbolden ( 176878 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @06:29AM (#50180345) Homepage

      How is someone going to track an ISP in someone's head? Townships are not going to allow some ISP to pull out the 15% most profitable customers so that Comcast or Time Warner pull out and 85% of their township has no internet or all. Which means the contract is going to highly regulated and expensive. Someone is going to have to come in with a credible claim. To do that they are often going to need to provide other utility services cable TV and phone being the most common. Those are both regulated industries.

      The business internet market is a much less regulated market and while the quality is much higher, the prices are many times higher. Commercial gigabit connections are generally a few thousands not a few hundred dollars a month. Connection charges can range from say $1500 to $11k, they aren't $99-129.

      Smart people are doing a very good job weighing the various interests in networking and putting together compromises that meet most of them. Those dinosaurs are doing a very good job of providing tremendous bandwidth at low cost to 99% of America's 130m households. There is no conspiracy and there are no easy fixes. Government is tremendously supportive to increasing bandwidth almost everywhere. I'm sure there is some corruption but corruption is a lazy excuse for people who have no clue about the economics of the industry to pretend that things could be fixed if only the government got out of the way.

      • by Raenex ( 947668 )

        Smart people are doing a very good job weighing the various interests in networking and putting together compromises that meet most of them. Those dinosaurs are doing a very good job of providing tremendous bandwidth at low cost to 99% of America's 130m households.

        Did you pull that 99% figure out of your ass? Here are those "smart people" at work:

        http://www.publicintegrity.org... [publicintegrity.org]

        • by jbolden ( 176878 )

          What does public broadband have to do with the discussion? This was about cost of providing service not how it should be paid for.

          • by Raenex ( 947668 )

            It's about big ISPs and government screwing up broadband access. You decided to pull the 99% figure out of your ass. You defended the big ISPs and government. Now when presented with some contradictory information, you want to dodge it.

            • by jbolden ( 176878 )

              You aren't contradicting anything I'm saying. You are talking about something entirely irrelevant, the payment model. Big ISPs are not screwing up broadband access in preventing municipalities from offering it, they are screwing up socialized access. Socialized access has had huge problems remaining viable where it has been tried as costs of management and administration explode. Whether one things those viability issues can be overcome or not has nothing to do with whether fiber gets laid. A socialize

              • by Raenex ( 947668 )

                You aren't contradicting anything I'm saying.

                You claimed, "Those dinosaurs are doing a very good job of providing tremendous bandwidth at low cost to 99% of America's 130m households."

                I challenged your 99% figure. I also linked an article that shows "those dinosaurs" preventing access from being expanded to people who don't have it.

                • by jbolden ( 176878 )

                  http://www.statista.com/statis... [statista.com]
                  http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/f... [mapbox.com]

                  Also the dinosaurs they weren't preventing access in the sense we were talking about. If the municipality was being blocked from offering wifi then a local company had wired up the area. No one prevents access where they can't or won't provide service.

                  • by Raenex ( 947668 )

                    http://www.statista.com/statis...
                    http://a.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/f [mapbox.com]...

                    So your 99% figure was bullshit, based on your own links.

                    Also the dinosaurs they weren't preventing access in the sense we were talking about. If the municipality was being blocked from offering wifi then a local company had wired up the area. No one prevents access where they can't or won't provide service.

                    Read the fucking article. These were areas whose needs were not being met and the dinosaurs lobbied, threatened to sue, or sued their way to prevent municipalities from offering services that would meet their needs.

      • by guruevi ( 827432 )

        If TWC/Comcast threatens to pull out, I would let them and give the copper to the newcomers. The copper in your street (cable, phone, even fiber) has been paid several times over by the taxpayers from federal, state and/or local funds. Give it back already or charge a reasonable price.

        • by jbolden ( 176878 )

          I don't think you mean copper when we are talking internet. In terms of copper though Verizon and AT&T would love to rid themselves of all their copper. Whenever they get the chance they dump it on less regulated providers who bundle it up for PRI or bonded T1s.

          As for fiber no generally it hasn't been paid for. The companies are still paying down their investment in residential internet. And this is happening as the number of subscribers is dropping not increasing meaning they might never pay it dow

          • by guruevi ( 827432 )

            Copper as in either cable or DSL has been paid for under FCC Title II. Verizon FiOS has classified itself as Title II to get the subsidies and tax breaks for it's rollout. ISP's have been collecting and permitted to keep federal and state "taxes" on every bill to implement higher bandwidth services since at least the nineties.

            • by jbolden ( 176878 )

              Fios was until recently not Title II. The FCC classified it as such, potentially not Verizon. Verizon wanted FIOS private. As for the fees on the bills, they haven't been able to keep that. That's a tax collected by the FCC and used as a subsidy for rural access. It was working well until a few years ago and now is starting to fail as the FCC keeps raising the minimum bandwidth.

              • by guruevi ( 827432 )

                I don't think I have to point out some thing that was widely covered by media about a year ago: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... [arstechnica.com]

                • by jbolden ( 176878 )

                  If you read the article it is a bit more nuanced:

                  FTTP, the fiber is Title II
                  FIOS the service is Title I

                  Which makes sense. But I don' see how that proves that the public has paid for the fiber that exists on modern broadband connections. You certainly could argue in a well populated area that's had broadband for 20 years that something like 3mb/sec broadband connections were semi-public (since things like the colo to remix signal were never public). If that's what you mean by copper... I guess one could

  • How many sites will let you download an ISO at gigabit speed?

    So this Gig speed will only be used by a junkie with a 4K TV, or a dozen kids with 802.11ac laptops with malware. Maybe you will try to use it for work so they can replicate the SAN to your house? Maybe you will try to run your own mail server or serve up ammeter porn?

    How many SOHO WIFI routers can really do GIG on the Ethernet ports or even supply 802.11ac at full speed for 1 client? Sounds like a lot of clueless home users calling into the IS

    • by ledow ( 319597 )

      60Mbps = 7.5MBps.

      Not sure at all that I'll judge my future spending on someone who doesn't get this.

      Gigabit has tons of uses and don't equate "ISP's" with "consumer-only ISP's". Businesses will happily pay for Gigabit speeds, therefore small businesses will do too, therefore work-at-home people like graphic designers or similar will do too.

      It's not a question of whether the hardware can take it (the ISP's can always supply compatible hardware because nobody knows what the fuck ADSL2 vectoring, or DOCSIS 3

      • The general rule I use is to divide mbps by ten to get MBps, rather than 8. The slight over-division compensates for various overheads - headers, dropped packets, etc.

        It'd be better if we weren't stuck on such tiny MTUs still, but backwards compatibility demands it: Anything over 1500 bytes is probably going to run into an ethernet segment somewhere and go wrong.

      • Well, Well, Well...

        I think you might be the .01% of the Internet users. Most can't spell computer or know how to use it.

        I agree on the backup, but all the commercial companies know how to do backups at night with something as slow as DSL, and all those Cable modem users are not symmetric either.

        If your doing work from home, you either have a competent IT department or you don't. Most larger companies have a remote solution, Server based computing using RDP. PCoIP or the like.

        Graphic designers... Hell the

    • Why would you need to download an ISO at gigabit speed? This isn't a critical task, you can run it in background. I don't see the point. Your life is paused until the download is completed?
  • We always suspected that submitters and editors do not understand maths, but now we know it.

    The key word is "percent", not annualized. There is nothing sneaky about annualizing - they just compare one quarter to the same quarter next year. But putting it into relative growth figures makes it look impressive.

    Personally I think we will see tremendous growth in 1Gb connections for a while. It is a standard technology transition process, and it is clearly entering the rapid growth phase.

  • craptastic (Score:4, Informative)

    by l3v1 ( 787564 ) on Saturday July 25, 2015 @07:18AM (#50180407)
    "83 Internet access providers have joined Google to offer gigabit Internet access service (all priced in the $50-$150 per month range)."

    Meanwhile, people still pay ~$40 for a 4mbit at&t line. There being lots of smaller regional players providing some service to a limited population doesn't mean crap in the more global view of how things are standing. Reality is, very many cties how only 1 to 3 choices, none of them really good, and absolutely none of them priced realistically. I don't care about statistics, when we can see the reality wit our own eyes.
  • Great. Now when are they going to offer IPv6? A gigabit bandwidth should be enough for anyone (for the new few 100 years anyway) so time to start concentrating on native IPv6 support as the next "killer feature".

    • by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Most of these newcomers do it. They'll give you both an IPv4 address and an IPv6 range. Even TWC is doing it, I currently have IPv6 connectivity directly to my computer (which is behind IPv4 NAT).

  • Sure, the ISPs offer it... just not to your home. Or mine. Or in 90% of the country. I'm sure many of the ISPs /technically/ provide the gigabit-speeds but the area where people can actually get it is probably very, very limited. This is just another fluff piece from the telecom industry hoping to make people believe America isn't as technologically backward as Europe, Japan or Korea; "Look, American Internet is as fast as in the rest of the world!". They hope to forestall government regulation enforcing m

  • ...In the final analysis, if Comcast’s 25 Mbps internet costs $50 per month ...

    Around here, since Comcast has little competition, Comcast's 25mbps internet costs well over $50 per month.

    .
    Hopes of seeing anything approaching gigabit speeds this decade are quite low.

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