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."
Hope they start using bittorrent (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hope they start using bittorrent (Score:4, Informative)
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They have their own slashdot [slashdot.jp] too..
Sweet! (Score:5, Funny)
That makes it much more likely that Japanese slashdot users will get first post!
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Wouldn't that be the one with a station wagon full of DVDs? Or are you confusing two concepts here...
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They have their own slashdot for that.
Ironically, this isn't a front page story on slashdot.jp.
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It wouldn't give them first post that would be ping. It will just allow them to post a few trillion times an hour.
Wouldn't do us here in the US much good (Score:2)
Just means we would reach our cap that much sooner. And of course, the ISP's would just go off and over sell that too.
Think of the Backbone (Score:3, Insightful)
I thought the service providers were already complaining about individual users clogging up "the pipes".
Giving a bigger bandwidth to end users is just asking for more backend network congestion.
Unless they are expecting us to continue along the http: clicky traffic model with all this new bandwidth.
YouTube and movie on demand services look more usable with this increased bandwidth.
I suppose the service providers are drooling at the thought of pricing per gigabyte downloads along the lines of text-message pricing.
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Then upgrade the backbone. Instead of limiting the speed for end users, invest in the backbone and eliminate the clogging. I'm guessing Japan doesn't have that big of a problem with the backbone though. (neither does Sweden it would appear, I can easily reach 100 Mbps if I download directly from someone else on a 100 Mbps connection within Sweden)
Re:Think of the Backbone (Score:4, Informative)
I work at tech support for one of swedens largest ISP:s (bredbandsbolaget). We're currently testing 1gbit-connections with a couple of hundred customers. I'm guessing we'll start selling to the general public within the next two years or so. ^^
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Except most people in the U.S. live in urbanized metro areas. The classic suburb is often medium density with lots of infill. The vast majority of land in the U.S. is dead space.
There is an enourmous amount of fiber capacity for SONET backbones, with most of it unused.
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The US is larger than both Sweden and Japan, yes. But it also has a larger population, and thus a larger economy than either, which should be able to support that infrastructure.
And the US has a higher population density that Sweden.
You have highways running all over the country right? Why wouldn't you make the same investment for the backbone?
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ISPs.. If they want to remain competitive..
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You're being gouged. I pay less than that for 100/100. If there is any sort of competition (from what I've heard, competition is lacking in the US broadband market though), the ISPs would invest that money without rate hikes in order to attract more customers. It's not like they don't have any profit margin on those 55 dollars a month they charge you.
They probably make huge profits but they are unwilling to invest in infrastructure because it's a long term investment. It doesn't pay off within 6 months so t
Not in Japan (Score:5, Informative)
I thought the service providers were already complaining about individual users clogging up "the pipes". Giving a bigger bandwidth to end users is just asking for more backend network congestion.
Far from it, actually. Japan is the world leader in internet infrastructure.
See the recent study [google.com] that quantified this into a "bandwidth quality score" for 42 countries. Japan's score was basically double everyone else. USA scored 16th, UK 24th.
And their population is only a little less than half of the United States, but being spread out over an area 25 times smaller is really what makes adoption a bit easier for them.
Re:Not in Japan (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that the size of a country is what holds it back from high speed access is a myth. Japan may be smaller than the US, but it is a lot larger than the UK and contains some really difficult terrain. Yet, they are still pushing for universal fibre access by 2010, even in small remote villages in mountainous regions.
If it was simply a question of population density, then why does no-where in the UK have fibre yet? Why does fibre in the US seem to be stuck at 20mb?
The reason Japan is so fast is that the government decided BB was an important infrastructure/utility, like the road and rail networks or the electricity grid, and pushed it forwards themselves. After nationalising all our publicly owned infrastructure and utilities here in the UK, we are now realising that they need to be state owned or heavily state regulated or the country as a whole suffers. I expect BB will go the same way eventually, or we will simply fall very far behind and loose out to the rest of Europe.
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SMS is free in japan and most ISPs charge a flat rate with hard caps around 30Gigs a day (upload i believe). I'm sure this much faster service will have a cap around 500G upload per day. Almost no chance they will be charging by the gig.
If you can afford a single-family home in Tokyo... (Score:5, Insightful)
Chances are good the price you pay for your Internet access is largely irrelevant.
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Do you think we forgot Hiroshima and Nagasaki??? Keep thinking... Time of our revenge is about to come. The USA are going to pay for all the evil they did around the world...
Oh yes, and surely the best way to exact revenge for these nuclear attacks is by getting faster internet!
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And more were killed in the conventional firebombing of Tokyo.
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I guess this is off topic, but I have to agree with you. I think that people think of Japan as crowded and expensive because they come here as tourists. They go to all the famous sites where people are jammed in like sardines. And they buy stuff at tourist places and get ripped off. Or eat steak at a restaurant.
I've been living here a year (admittedly in the inaka) and I spend *far* less than I did in Canada. Of course, you have to live like a Japanese person (buy the same food, wear the same clothes,
Synchronous? (Score:2)
Re:Synchronous? (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's really synchronous. That's how they can afford to do it cheaply. It works like this:
Suppose you want to download a video. For every packet of the video you download, you need to upload one. Now naturally, you can't upload somebody else's copyrighted content. So you have to upload original video content that somebody else wants to watch.
The main sponsors of the rollout are porn companies, because that's the only kind of marketable content most people can create. Some camwhores will probably do all right, too. And if you live in an interesting neighborhood, you can put up some webcams to meet the synchronous data requirement.
Most people, though, won't be able to generate enough content, so they'll have to pay extra to get the synchronous requirement waved. It's sort of like how cellphone companies sell you a cheap plan, knowing they'll screw you on extras.
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This sounds like a marvelous business plan. How do I invest?
Synchronous? (Score:5, Informative)
Slashdot, get your act together! (Score:2)
My thoughts exactly.
I wish slashdot would finally hire some editors with a clue. It can't be so hard, can it?
Seriously, the way slashdot is headed I won't be surprised when it dies the death-by-fork, soon...
Re:Slashdot, get your act together! (Score:4, Informative)
Not Slashdot's fault. Mine. I've been putting in networks long enough (22 years) to know the difference.
Must be getting senile.
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Yes, I meant symmetric. Sorry, my brain fart. I was rushing out the door before posting and couldn't get the right word out.
I knew, however, that some pedantics would show up and correct the oversight in a suitably (im)mature fashion.
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.
What's Japan going to DO with 1Gbps? (Score:3, Insightful)
Watch streaming video without having to hit 'pause' on the player to let it fully buffer before even starting to play?
Not have to shut down other applications because my 4 BitTorrent connections are making my email logon time out and my web browser not load images on the pages (assuming it can even load the page to begin with)?
Lots of possibilities for new applications, but just fixing the current problems would be marvelous.
Yeah, these problems won't be fixed without backbone upgrades, but I bet Japan does
Re:Not hard technology; it's the politics (Score:5, Funny)
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
You become terribly bitter and unhappy, but you try really hard not to show it. Then you invent Monty Python.
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Oh, sheesh, slashdot. No, I wasn't thinking of faster downloads or gaming. I was thinking of some of that stuff WiReD promised us ten years ago: most office jobs done from home via telecommuting, equipment managed from home by telepresence.
Telecommuting didn't take off for the same reason we have business travel in a world of phones and faxes and E-mail: because people doing business want to connect personally. 80% of human communication, we're told, is in voice tones, facial expressions, body language.
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What's Japan going to DO with 1Gbps?
Well, today I bought the GTA collection on Steam since it was half off. Trust me, those 8.6 GBs would go a lot, lot faster with Gbps downloads. At 1-2 minute download time, you could almost call it instant satisfaction.
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Why do you think a server would be able to devote more resources to the game than a dedicated home system?
Photon/Ray-Tracing requires a LOT of horsepower. What makes you think that a server shared by thousands of people will be able to give you any more cycles than a dedicated high performance workstation?
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That and the bottleneck is already processing power to move mmos to the servers. MMOs pretty much work on 5KB/s at the moment. We could probably find a way to expend that extra bandwidth to make things smoother but home user internet is nowhere near bottlenecking at the moment (in games anyways). Though we could use maybe a single percent of it to stream bluray videos (54Mb/s) not that there are any providers for it now we could build a distributed p2p streaming service with home connections this fast. At t
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http://finance.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chdet=1222551456859&chddm=98532&q=INDEXDJX:.DJI&ntsp=0 [google.com]
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In terms of their GDP, yes, their debt is massive (nearly double their GDP, compared to ~60% in the US's case), but their current accounts (effectively trade balance) is in much better shape than the US, sitting at about 200 billion (2nd highest only after China) in the positive, compared to the US which is over 7 trillion in the negative.
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I always wonder when people say this kind of thing because I never find Japan to seem overly crowded. So I looked it up.
Japan *does* have roughly 10 times the population density of the US (339/km2 vs 31/km2). But in comparison to Europe, it's not really very different. For instance the Netherlands and Belgium have higher population densities (395 and 341). The UK has similar density at 246.
But I think especially when we're talking about fiber rollout, we're mostly talking about doing so in *cities*. In
Funny how we hear (Score:4, Insightful)
that the world is getting more bandwidth capacity to individuals on new technology, whereas most of the US is on cable modem and we're getting new restrictions after years of unannounced restrictions placed on our bandwidth.
The reason is obvious. (Score:5, Funny)
Their appetite for tentacle rape porn is insatiable. I expect we'll see another bandwidth increase in about 6 months. Honestly, how much tentacle rape porn can there be in the world?!?!
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Honestly, how much tentacle rape porn can there be in the world?!?!
There can never be enough.
how far does the 1Gbps go? in town only? in the lo (Score:2)
how far does the 1Gbps go? in town only? in the local switch only?
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If it's anything like my broadband connection here in the USA, it probably goes to the curb where it is converted into 1200bps bisync running on a Zilog 8530 (not the new fangled fancy 85230 with data FIFOs).
Two words (Score:2)
No Fair!!
I wish I could get 1/10th of this at a decent price. Good for them though
Whats wrong in the U.S. (Score:2, Insightful)
Questionnaire for comparison (Score:3, Interesting)
I pay $58/month for symetric 100Mbps in Sweden.
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Around $45 a month, Chicago suburb (USA), just tested at about 4.5Mbps down, 1.5 Mbps up, no other significant traffic on my connection.
Comcast.
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Available speeds:
15/15 via Cox cable,
20/20 via Verizon FIOS - $70/month
1.5/384k via Verizon DSL - $30
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~20$ a month for 512kpbs down in Canada, plus 15% discount for having cable TV.
I'd rather have 1gbps and drop my cable plan, but it doesn't look like there's good stations on IPTV (the two CNNs are a must, as would be local channels, but I can get the local ones OTA).
Too much (Score:3, Insightful)
1Gbps is more... (Score:2)
Why don't we just use the telegraph? (Score:2)
Fuck you Comcast. Fuck you AT&T.
Because of your greed and sloth, the US is laggard in online innovation and content delivery. Enjoy it while you can. We may have invented everything, but the Japanese are making it cooler, smaller, faster, cheaper, and more reliable than us. The snarling greed of US corporate enterprise has reared its ugly head for three decades. It has ruined our way of life and our safety and our nation. This really doesn't surprise me all that much. I pay the same price for 6Mb
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Of course we'll never see that kind of high speed internet here in the US. The Senator from Disney would have a fit if we could pirate their ol
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oh dear, I almost had milk come out my nose. The Senator from Disney line made me laugh harder than I have in weeks. And yet it makes me weep.
I have long been calling them congresswhores since their services seem to be available for the right price to anyone and they're up for anything.
It's really just the U.S. slipping its wang into the tired, loose diseased vag of fascism. The fascina. It has magical powers over people.
It causes bad things later on when the U.S. is trying to pee. By pee, I simply mea
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Examine the population density of various major US and Japanese cities. They're surprisingly comparable.
yeah, right.... (Score:2)
The link (fiber) may be able to handle 1gbps, but users aren't going to get that much in reality. Why not? It's the routing. Call up your favorite router vendor, and ask what it would take to route 100 gigabits. Then consider that with the density of living in Japan, you could put one of those in every neighborhood, and still not be able to get even half of the people up to full gigabit speed.
If the island of Japan can do this... (Score:3, Insightful)
Some countries claim their size holds them back but the UK doesn't have that excuse. We're just getting screwed.
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It is not entirely about population or population density. There's almost as much people in London as there are people in the whole of Sweden. UK people should on average have better internet access than us swedes.
Population:
Sweden: 9,2 million
UK: 60 million (7 million in London)
Land area:
Sweden: 450 000 square kilometer
UK: 245 000 square kilometer
Population density:
Sweden: 20 individuals / square kilometer
UK: 250 individuals / square kilometer
US: 30 individuals / square kilometers (still there should be e
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We do have fiber at work and that's one of the joys of getting in before 8am before anyone else. The speeds I get are enough to make me cum my pants harder than any woman could do for me.
Fast PC, slow web (Score:2)
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Find better servers. I routinely grab large files from SUNET/FUNET FTP's, and easily get more than 20Mb/s on a single transfer. And unlike with BitTorrent, my connection is still useful for other activities.
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USians don't deserve real broadband (Score:2)
...and Comcast cant even provide 1MB per sec. (Score:2)
Comcast is just another corrupt American business that rips off our citizens and uses our government to legalize and enforce their never ending blood sucking existence.
Broadband is just that... and if you can not provide it... I hope your company dies a swift death so that another more serious business can move in and do the right thing.
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:Brilliant! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Brilliant! (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, he has a very good point.
Imagine a botnet of 10000 zombied windows machines on 3.0Mbps up/down.
Now imagine a botnet of 10000 zombied windows machines on 1Gbps up/down.
Now if you're the target of the latter botnets DoS attack, i'm sure you'd be asking "what in the hell do they need that much upstream for to begin with!".
Some would have very good uses for that bandwidth but if their market is anything like what I see in north america, at least half or more will be people who get it because of shinyness or the myth of the best. Depending on the ToS, this could be quite the liability for the rest of the world at large unless enough of the worlds backbones are similarly upgraded to handle the home user market hitting 1Gbps+. Not saying it is a bad thing overall, simply that the concern is valid and that given time it will no longer be a problem. Right now, he has a point.
Doesn't really matter (Score:5, Insightful)
It'll be hard for you to tell the difference
I think most sites don't even have a 1Gbps link.
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It does for sites that have the lower total throughput but have a fair bit of redundancy in place for security sake. If your disaster recovery analysis is based on the average zombie having access to 3-10Mbit, then a sudden influx of zombied 1Gbps links would definitely pooch the whole deal and make your "redundancy" rather useless. THAT is where the difference would be seriously noticeable.
You're right though for cases of smaller providers using a single connection for the entirety of their service. In tho
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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.
Re:Doesn't really matter (Score:4, Insightful)
true, but also i don't think limiting consumer broadband speeds is a sound method of combating the DDoS problems.
i'm sure 1Gbps up/down sounds ridiculous to many Americans, but it probably doesn't sound so absurd to Japanese consumers. i assume that if they've decided to make such an upgrade to consumer level broadband speed, then they're probably making equivalent increases to business connections. it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that bandwidth costs will decrease over time. this is just an indication that Japan is ahead of the curve right now.
i mean, you're not going to give a home user a 1 Gbps connection if the ISP can't handle that. and if the ISP can handle all home users having 1 Gbps then they can surely handle much bigger pipes for business/enterprise users.
so maybe it's time for the U.S. to stop dicking around, wasting resources on packet shaping/bandwidth throttling (you know, spend money on actually increasing broadband speeds?) unless we want to be left in the dust. if we started increasing our network capacity to handle 1 Gbps home connections, then we won't have to worry about being DDoSed by 1 Gbps botnets.
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unfortunately, American businesses are so obsessed about squeezing every penny out of their customers that they can, that they have to clue how to actually provide a service that people will pay for and be loyal to. I'm not sure why Comcast would rather squeeze $50/month out of me, and have me pissed off at them for everything from lousy customer service to service restrictions, and have me tell anyone who will listen that they should look for any viable alternative in their area that to have me pay $45 per
Re:Doesn't really matter (Score:5, Insightful)
We also have to wait for the internet to catch up too. YouTube is still showing video at ADSL1 bitrates, and most (good) websites are still mainly text-only (thank god).
I predict that we're within "a generation" of superfluous bandwidth - that is, regular home connections will never even come close to completely saturated under reasonable use, because the content is simply not heavy enough. This is similar to what's happened with processing power (a P4 is more powerful than Joe User will ever need) and hard disk space (I've never heard of a non-nerd actually filling as much as 120GB). The only "killer app" I can imagine that'll take bandwidth into the final generation before superfluous bandwidth is streamed high-resolution video (YouTubeHD, etc). After that, we'll probably start to see mobile internet become more and more prevalent, as we have seen with the miniaturisation of computers due to superfluous processing/storage. Of course, there'll always be us nerds who'll never be able to have enough, but we're in the minority so we'll probably stay glued to wires, as we have been glued to desktops in the land of the laptop (yes, I know most/all of us have laptops, but that's usually in addition to some kind of powerful desktop/high capacity homebrew server).
Personally, I think that 1GB/s synchronous is probably well within the category of "superfluous bandwidth" - that's more than enough for streaming high resolution video.
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i get what you're saying, but i don't think we should equivocate web usage with internet usage. remember, smart devices are on the rise, and with VoIP, internet radio, digital TV, etc. we're seeing more and more specialized communications networks being supplanted by the internet.
my boss already finds Skype much more economical for his business than a regular land line, but he does complain that audio quality drops occasionally, which i suspect is a bandwidth or network throughput issue. i wouldn't at all b
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Maybe your hypothetical person under attack from botnets should move to Japan and get cheap broadband.
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I suppose, if you want to pay for the 10000 concatenated links to withstand what I was describing.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
Only thing they'll be good for DoS attacking is something in Japan because they'll instantly hit a bottleneck of epic proportions the moment they try to touch the US Network with all its bandwidth problems :P
I think some ISP in Japan recently capped their users at like 250 GB A DAY... Whatever Japan is doing is what the US should be doing in terms of expanding their network. I understand theres alot more problems like distance and such but still.
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Touche, i was not even thinking of the fact that all those users are squished at the under sea backbones. Reduces the point, but does not eliminate it COMPLETELY it as it still creates a situation where it becomes much easier for those bottlenecks to be maxed out. I suppose anyone reviewing this would just have to change their analysis to be based on the maximum throughput out of japan not the number of gigabit connections.
Wait. Does anyone have the figures of how much bandwidth is available when counting t
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I understand theres alot more problems like distance and such but still.
If Japan can be connected to the rest of the internet with multiple underwater cables, I see it as a lame excuse we can't connect our country to itself with cables on land.
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If it was correct, then you would be able to, in Manhattan for instance, get 100Mbs for $20/month and without any limitations. Can you link me tyo such an offer?
Most US metropolitan areas have population density far exceeding many Japanese cities. And if you even bothered to look at a population density map of USA, you would see that 80% of the population lives in non-rural areas.
Stop drinking the koolaid that tells you USA is special. It's spe
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so what you're saying, essentially, is that NONLINEARITY IS WRONG?
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nah, the thinking right now is 3 Mbps (burst) should be enough for everyone.
ISPs want consumers to conform their usage to the service provider's business model--overselling and artificially manipulate internet usage through bandwidth caps, packet shaping, etc.
those crazy Japanese actually think that supply should try to meet demand, rather than the other way around? what madness is this?
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I don't see much use for 1Gbps either, I rarely use the full capacity of my 100 Mbps. But there will probably come some use for 1 Gbps connections in the future, so it's always good to be ready. Who would have predicted 100 Mbps being (somewhat, here at least) common (or having a use) 10 years ago when we were waiting for DSL to get us out of the dial-up world.
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Honestly, I'm sure that uses will naturally grow to fill the available pipe. It always happens. But, I'd have no idea what to do with that much ban
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At 1 gig/second you could download those things you want to try HD within 10seconds anyways, no need to store the internet on your computer.
I'm more curious what this will do to the p2p scene. Right now torrents will rarely cap my meager 600KB/s download. If there were a few people on the torrent seeding w/ 1Gb/s it would easily cap. Unfortunately Japan rarely uses torrents. I'm wondering if it would be easier at this point to switch services. Annoying to write fresh code to remote control the new
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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.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Informative)
Considering that blue-ray is 1080p, but limited to 54Mbps, I think one can safely assume, that 1Gbps is not entirely necessary for that kind of thing.
Super HiVision, on the other hand, would be a different matter.
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I have IP TV (Telus) and am essentially limited to 3Mbps down 700K up due to the presence of that TV. The total bandwidth coming down according to the tech is 15Mbps. 5Mbps is taken by each of the two TV adapters leaving 5 or less for regular Internet.
Dropped by my brother-in-law's apartment in Tokyo a few weeks ago who has 100Mbps fiber. Incredible.
Phenomenal Cosmic Bandwidth!!!!!
Itty bitty living space.
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Slow down, you're just jealous.
This is EXACTLY what civilized nations should be doing. Gigabit fiber is about as fast as you can go on such a wide-scale before cost shoots to infinity.
They won't have 1Gbps to the rest of the world, but as a local interconnect, it's excellent. The main pipe leading out of Japan will still be the same size, and you'll get the same volume of Viagra spam as always. Actually most of that garbage comes from China, Malaysia and Brazil - Japan actually does have a functional leg
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I've got a mythbox sitting in Yamanashi. I think I'll find something to do with this upstream....
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"Try 4 minutes"
wouldnt it be 30 seconds? or even 15 seconds if you are downloading and uploading at cap.
Its 4 minutes if its 1024/8 which is a 1GB line, not 1GB Per Second
Not that it matters cause neither the 1Gbps nor the 30GB cap reality, or proven yet.
Re:Brilliant! (Score:5, Insightful)
you're forgetting the difference between GB and Gb (bytes vs. bits). there are 8 Gb in 1 GB.
If the connection is 1Gbps: 30 GB * 8 GB/Gb = 240 Gb, which is 240 seconds. 240 seconds is 4 minutes.
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Actually you are off by a little bit. Bytes are measured in powers of 1024, while bits are not. Thus you need to adjust by a factor of 2^30/10^9.
Or 30 GB * (1 S/Gb) * (Gb/10^9 b) * (8 b / B) * (2^30 B / GB) = 4 minutes 18 seconds
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United States of America != "everyone else"
In reality, everyone else is laughing. Japan included.