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100Mbps Internet Access For $1000 Per Month
A reader writes "Cogent, a startup ISP that has just recently completed their fiber optic network across the US, is now offering 100Mbps internet access for $1000 a month in some major metropolitan areas." A few caveats of course - I'm not sure how close to actually connecting people they are - but it does sound like a nice deal.
The Broadcom CMTS chip usually comes in a 8:1 flavour (8 upload channels for 1 download channels).
With existing cable infrastructure, it can be a challenge to find all the available upload bandwidth within 8 frequency slices, while the download channel is usually much higher up in the list, and it not a problem at all. Hence the single channel allowed to it for up to 27Mbps.
--
Let's not all suck at the same time please
Let's not all suck at the same time please
If they say they're all Cisco, then they get their equipment for about half off. :-)
I wonder what the CIR actually is though. I assume that they don't have enough peering to make sure people actually get that much bandwidth while talking to a bunch of distant machines. WOuld be nice to sign up at two different locations within their network and make a VPN though, because i bet they _are_ that fast to themselves...
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Call me at 917.679.5297 and I can tell you about our presence in Boston. Evan Gillman
Bah! I connect at 150MB/s, and I only pay $40 per month. Ok,ok, so it's a cable modem, but I really do see that much bandwidth as a rule, so who cares?
"My job is being right when other people are wrong." -- George Bernard Shaw
And how many of your friends who aren't geeks (oh wait, bad question) still turn their computers off all the time. Where oh where is the email to go when your computer is off? Not a very reliable way to do it. Dedicated servers will be around for a long time.
Hmm, i would, but it's not like i'm anyone special... i don't own a business and i'm not some bigwig landlord... I think it would make more sense to post the info here :)
My mom says there's a lot of Penguins in Antarctica. The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
I've not seen the docmentation myself, but I do notice that when I visit the connection is significantly faster than what I get in Berkeley.
Also, unlike in Berkeley, he does not seem to be affected by the time of day. In the SFBA most of the people I know with @Home find a significant lag increase during prime time 5pm and 11pm.
Teeny little correction there, "dark fiber" is *not* bandwidth. It's just what you'd think, a peice of cable in the ground, with no light (and hence, no packets). To get bandwith, you have to "light" the fiber, and that's the expensive part. So, sure, dark fiber is cheap. It's also usless because you have to light it to use it, and the ends are expensive. (although, that is a one-time cost)
--Maarken
Why stop at 100Mb when you can pump full blown
1000base ethernet down that fibre......
www.worldwidepackets.com
If there are girls at the lan party either you've been slipped some acid or one of your friends has had an operation.
-Zane
This sig is worse than my last.
right, and then everyone could then get root on your machine without possessing any skill whatsoever. scp works well for me, but ftp is easier to deal with. Try using Proftpd instead. You dont see root hacks posted for it twice a week, unlike the WU garbage.
--
Daniel J. Kelly
If you think about it, $1000 for 100Mbps makes starting an isp of your own somewhat viable. Assume 100 customers per line, each with 1Mbps (125kB/s), each paying $40 per month and you've got $4000 for your $1000 investment. Of course, this doesn't factor in last mile installation or staff wages, but I don't know enough about that to make an estimate. Still, with a price like this, I could hook up my neighborhood and get that new porche I've had my eye on.
Site swamped by Linux surfer nerds? Switch to Cogent, and kiss your /. troubles goodbye!
Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
yeah, I've got 10Mbps but I don't get that speed most of the time. In fact I've never gotten up to full speed. The most I ever got was something like 420KBps (34%) but usually I'm around 50KBps (4%).
Ha...that's funny. *sigh*...I miss my college days (ended this past May)...100 Mbps ethernet was truly eggsellent. I remember transferring files between a computer lab and the computer in my dorm room via ftp I actually saw the data rate get up to 60 Mbps...the highest I ever saw.
Those were the days. Of course, my connection at work isn't so bad, so I can't complain.
"It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."
Time is fun when you're having flies.
-Kermit the Frog
so... .4MB/sec then
my cable is
because i frequently d/l 50MB in just a few seconds
not bad for $AU75/month
T1: 190KB/s
56kbps: ~6KB/s
therefore T1 is only 30 times faster than dial-up??
Can someone point me in the right direction where i can read something that explaines what i have got wrong here?
Thanks
-Chris
cjconlan@optushome.com.au
Yeah, here in Austin I have connectivity through Time-Warner (same network as @Home? not sure). Reading their terms of service ("no servers, you naughty little linux hacker") and looking at their bandwidth profile (15Kbps up, capped) leaves one with the distinct impression that they really aren't interested in being a 2-way IP(internet protocol)-carrier but rather a 1-way content provider.
I expect that this is common to other ISPs operated by cable companies, becuase their entire business mindset (up until recently) has been focused on being the sole source of information to passively absorbing masses of people (TV). Not too suprising that they'd approach the new medium of the Internet (new to them) with the same thought patterns of the old.
On an Austin-TW side-minirant, the main reason they give against home serving and for the bandwidth cap is that "they don't have enough bandwidth". Oh, I see, you have enough bandwidth for 60+ digital cable channels but not enough to let people upload files to work at more than a snail's pace? :-/ The other rational they give is that people only want to use servers for piracy (mp3, warez). How like a content company to assume all their customers are IP (int. prop.) criminals... :-(
(Side note: I'm not trying to be condescending by defining IP twice, I just didn't want their to be confusion about which expansion of IP I was refering to.--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Not true. Verizon offers in their Tier 3 ADSL package 680kb up, 7.1mb down. I've gotten 500KB transfers fairly regularly from certain high bandwidth sites , and I can regularly get 3 150KB+ connections going at once.
Think "multiple connections" instead of one fast connection point-to-point. This isn't for home use for you to download the latest game demo from gamespot, it's backbone for people running ISPs and ecommerce. These kinds of uses need to be able to handle a decently fast connection from MANY different sources at the same time.
therefore T1 is only 30 times faster than dial-up.
Yes, about. Though 56k downloads are restricted to 53k, at least in the US, and that is only for downloads, uploads are still at 33.6. A T1 is up and down ~190k. Cable is even faster than that, but again, the upload is usually severly limited.
Have you read my journal today?
I have found that most users problems relating to poor bandwidth on DSL lines is due to the TCP Recieve Window and MTU setting being to small for broadband access. http://www.dslreports.com has some good info on how to fix that.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
That's nice, but what's the point?
Two words: Counter. Strike.
-
$1000/month for 100 Mbps is good. Can you find anywhere that offers 67 T1 connections for the same price?
Just to further clarify, this service is decidedly aimed at business applications. Again, businesses; not individual residential subscribers. If you, your friend, your housemates, or anyone else you know is even remotely considering purchasing one of these for home use, there is a Big Blue Room that they should really consider visiting once and a while.
$ man reality
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Cogent Software is an ISP, not a software company (dispite the name) and that would but them in direct competition with each other.
Anm
I swear this repetition is becoming more common on /. Is it simply the number of articles being submitted that precludes doing verification of the uniqueness of a topic? Is real news hard to come by? Do the people in control not read the site?
I'm baffled since a simple search for "cogent" turned up the old article for me...
That would be almost like having lots of browsers open, wouldn't it?
Each one getting full external bandwidth concurrently, side by side down the ISP's fat pipe to your machine.
Where are you? I have linkline DSL, with the line provided by verizon. I pay $49/mo for static ip with 768k down / 128k up. Depending on the site, I always hit the 768k cap, no matter what time of day it is.
My suggestion is to NEVER go with the telco for your internet service... they usually screw it up pretty well. There are a ton of other providers out there who want your business, and are willing to give you static IP's and such.
you are
well we do have a major presence in boston...if you could put me in touch with someone who handles the technology for your company, it would be much appreciated.
Anyone can deliver 100Mbit MANs for $1000 when they obviously don't build on redundant technology...at least they're not multihomed and their primary pipe is down.
-- Andreas
Just who exactly does your campus connect to at 4Gbit/sec (assuming the second OC-48 is actually used actively and isn't just a hot spare)?
I'm not even sure that you can get OC-48 internet access without serious money and very special arrangements with a provider and I'm pretty sure it would be worse than having a half-dozen OC-3s to multiple providers.
Cognet is buying all their dark fiber from
,look under their corporate products -
Metromedia Fiber Networks, and then charging you
for just a piece of that bandwidth. However,
you can lease a strand from MFNX, have them light
it and off you go at an extremely low price.
Of course, this is *not* for the individual.
You can check them out here
managed SONET, MetroGig-E and WaveChannel Optical Nets
They mentioned something about building their own fibre network along with new technology that allows you to cram multiple waves over a single fibre. I really have no idea what this means, and they were sales guys, but their offer seemed worth listening to.
We're interested in their connection because it would allow us multiple internet uplinks (ie, redundancy) since Verizon has proven itself less than friendly/competent.
There was a catch though, and one that my boss was upset about. I haven't been given all of the details since I'm not in that office anymore.
That's nice, but what's the point? Unless you are exchanging data with someone else on that backbone
well doesn't it make sense to add more backbones and try to get people connected to them?
There is a post further down (with a reply by someone who works for one of these providers) which briefly discusses the business side of this.
Well, the T1 where I goto collage is 10kb sec !!! :-)
Thats when everything is bogged down at 1:00pm.
At night it goes up to 140kbps when its not being used
by anyone else. Its great to run a q3 server off of one
of their machines, and then go home, and admin it.
Just a note. Bellsouth blows. period.
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
Din't NT 4 have that problem? It was only capable of 90Mbits.
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
bahaha, that may be true in your town, Silicon Valley kid.. but I'm sitting in my cornfield in middle Indiana on cable modem and can pump full t1 speed.. Sometimes even faster! (T1=192KB, that's nothing.. I've pulled 300KB+ off of fileplanet or any other site..)
hehe, who needs big cities?
-since when did 'MTV' stand for Real World Television instead of MUSIC television?
But who are they peering with? Sure, you probably get 100mbs through their network but what about through their peering points? They better have OC-192 if they're going to do this.
That's co-location.
This isn't necessarily true. Case in point, our local university used to have quite a dialup system running off a miniswitch on campus tied to the CO downtown. One day the Prez of the university picked up his phone and had to wait 10 seconds for dial tone.
Needless to say, that problem was promptly resolved by moving most of the dialup system to the CO itself, then to a CLEC.
Which then brings us to your second point, interswitch capacity. The CLEC had only turned up one DS3 to the local ILEC tandem, and when all the students came back to school from summer break suddenly no one could call the dialup, and business customers of the CLEC couldn't call anywhere other than inside the switch. Guess that's what happens when you've got capacity on one side for about 2000 dialup users, and the 40,000 users on the other, and only 670 or so channels inbetween.
It just struck me that email servers (in the client/server scenario that we see today) will be made very much redundant in the future if we all have dedicated 100 meg pipes coming into our homes and PCs with a static IP. There will be no more need for store-and-forward messaging.
Universal broadband will totally change the face of what we do online, when, where and with whom.
I dont like PPPoe and I'll be the first to switch to static IP..... But Verizon...much to my dismay has been a good ISP. Getting it installed during the strike was a nightmare...but once is was running it has worked like a charm.. I get 540 kbps on a 640 line...pretty damn good... Tech support....I had unbelievable. I had Network engineers and tier three techs calling me to get me up and running... I know the horror stories...but I've only had a good experience with verizon...nevertheless PPPoe sucks.... Stephen.Power@NO_SPAMMY.verizon
"It's technical in a psychometric kind a way" -- C. Parish
I don't think there was any suggestion that 100Mpbs was for surfing.
This is actually potentially a really great deal for people who are paying through the nose for a T1 (typically $2000/month, or 12 times more expensive) or a DS-3 (even more exorbitant, $5000/mo not unheard of). If you're in a metro area, you're hosting your own web servers, and especially if you're stuck with a static market defined mainly by one Baby Bell, you're gonna love this.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
If you take the time to look at their website:
Cogent has many distinct market advantages to enhance your real estate investment... from
this page.
This is being marketed as something to install in the apartment building you own, not really as a personal connection to the internet.
On the other hand, considering building managment, do you really want the building super to also be your sysadmin?
Maybe if we can get some other companies doing this, we can finally get the nationwide fiber-optic internet access we were all promised to have by now.
As I said in another post, this is meant solely for business use. There are two reasons that spring to mind that a business would get this installed:
- 1) they have branch offices in the connected cities and they want to save on leased-line costs
- 2) they are a "serving" company (.com, ISP, co-lo provider, et al.) and need cheap bandwidth by the bucketfull, but not all to one big source (instead to a lot of little (modem) to medium (xdsl, cable,isdn) sources).
(or maybe some combination of the two).The network as described fits both of those needs very well. Now if for some reason you were the sole utilizer of the line and you wanted to just act like a surfer (wishing to get 100Mbps to, say, some pr0n site), yeah, you'd be screwed.
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Notice that Cogent states on their website: ". This congfiguration enables Cogent to offer each customer a fully dedicated, non-oversubscribed 100 Mbps connection that is not shared with anyone else. "
They do not guarentee this bandwidth anywhere I can see. I am running into a problem with my current ISP related to this: bandwidth sucks, and they keep telling me there's nothing they can do...nothing was contractually guarenteed. So needless to say, I'm searching for a new ISP...
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
You've been able to get 100 Mbps in Wellington, New Zealand for years now. Costs around NZ$600/month, IIRC (about US$250).
Glad to see the US is catching up with New Zealand...
and so i stand corrected .... it's not silicon valley, though. shores of eastern florida, but at least we can vote! sun must be bleaching my brain, though
I live in the concord pacific buildings in Yaletown ( in downtown ). My rent is $1000/month for a one bedroom + den. ( ~720 sq. feet ).
Ok, So I Called a colo place I have a server for because they have a very open door policy that if you can find them better deals for bandwidth they are willing to go for it. SO i saw this aritcal and said "Hey this would rock. It will beat the hell out of the 3 T1's they have now at a very reduced cost." So I called my guy and he talked to them. Here is the deal. "I spoke to a guy named Todd Kuehn a Cogent. He was real informative, but kind of arrogant (I could tell that we are not "big enough" of a customer). I didn't ask for his phone number, but his e-mail is tkuehn@cogentco.com . Here's the scoop on Cogent: It's available in a few big markets in the North East like Boston. Will be available here in 3rd quarter of 2001 . . . but not for everyone. Their target client is multi tenant buildings - big buildings. The reason? It costs the company $80,000 to hook up their network to a building. So he said . . . there is a minimum committment of 1GB/sec for $10,000/mo per building (so they break even by the 8th month and profit in month 9 and so forth). So they need a minimum committment of 10 customers in a single building to go in and install the fiber. Committ to a Gigabit/sec = 1,000 mbs/sec for $10,000 per month." Now, I don't know about you but the joe average user or even the small to mid size company cant aford that kind of bill. But it is still a good deal I guess.
I get 100Mbps at my apartment which is included in total rent and all we pay is $700 a month so $1000 seems a little expensive if you don't get a place to live along with it = )
thanks. i actually found that our IT manager had already contacted you at a trade show way b4 it came up on /...
AirSwitch is better. . . . . if they actually provided service to anyone besides no-name towns like Springville.
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
Where is your company located? Have you signed? Can I be of any assistance to you? Evan Gillman Cogent Communications egillman@cogentco.com 917.679.5297
I'm just inquiring about your services because i'll be moving back to boston soon, and i know there would be a LOT of residents that would be interested in your services. The only other options for broadband are Media One Cable and DSL (provided by Verizon). From what i hear, both those services are piss poor. So if you guys start wiring up apartment complexes, i sure as hell would like to know about it.
But it's not a physical property of the cable (or whatever) that makes upload necessarily slower than download, it's because these freakin devices were designed for companies that want upload speed limited and that think of the internet in terms of television broadcasting. They understand that there must be two way communication, but they don't like it. I agree with the original poster, I don't want my internet access to be (effectively) one way, I already have a television!
we're located away from your hubs/metro rings unfortunately. we were hoping to be included and sign up but thats in the air until we get some VC funding around feb in which case we can relocate and sign up.i'll contact you if i need anything..actually my IT manager will.
Does this have any relation to the Pasadena ISP Cogent Software? I would assume this would be a tradmark violation.
Anm
I looked at Verizon DSL because they told the ISP I wanted to use that they had no more capacity at my CO. Of course Verison could sell me a DSL line, but even for their "Business DSL" service (which is what I wanted) they couldn't provide me with even one static IP address. That is almost unspeakably dumb. Obviously they just want to sell more T1s at 10x the price.
Umm... maybe these hosts don't need to be routed to at all. I would expect that any decent network would not waste global IP addresses on strictly local boxes. If you look at their NS info you will see that three of the name servers listed are on private address space and are obviously internal name servers, forwarding all external queries to GATEKEEPER.cogentco.com. The only question at all is why these hosts are showing whois info. At worst it is a security leak-- and quite a bad one-- the opportunities for spoofing are enormous. Moreover, routers may have many interfaces and subinterfaces with different addresses (yes, some of them even *gasp* illegal rfc-1918 space). The @Home network seems to like 10.0.0 space, do a traceroute to any host on it and more likely than not there will be a couple hops through "unroutable" space... ie probably internal ints on core routers. The only problem is if they bleed these routes externally.
Yes, but what about their peering?
Your Working Boy,
To All, What you are reading is all true!!! Cogent Communications (www.cogentco.com) offers 100 MBPS of Internet access for $1000 per month all via fiber optics. We also offer a 1 Gig connection for $10,000 per month all via fiber optics. Our backbone runs at the OC-192 level and we have well over 100 public and private peers in place. If you would like more information feel free to contact me at 917.679.5297. Evan Gillman Cogent Communications NY Sales
true, the internet is slow. that's why i'm wondering why cogent is going to offer such high amounts of bandwidth when it won't be utilized. aren't they raising expectations too high and not effectively using the bandwidth? the internet is slow, but a network doesn't have to be. so why go across the public "network" (i.e. the internet)
--Tom
Tom Geller
Several companies are doing the same thing (Yipes, Universal Access, Davnet, Quartet Services, etc.) for the same price. The solution, typically called "in-building Ethernet," is aimed at multi-tenant buildings. Routers or optical switches connect buildings in a metropolitan-area network. Buildings are wired with fiber up and down building risers, with switches at various points; copper runs from the switches to a jack in each office. Once a client is signed up, the switch port is activated. Very simple stuff. Customers not signing up for 100Mbps are rate-limited in the router to DS-1, DS-3, 10Mbps, or whatever they signed up for. Typically a provider has a DS-3 (T-3) or an OC-3 (STM-1) for peering. Providers with lots of customers on a large MAN are using OC-12 (STM-4) for peering. Is the customer thus getting true 100Mbps Internet access? No. Is the customer getting more bandwidth at a better price than is possible otherwise? Yes.
All ISPs are not created equal, pal. Personally, I work my ass off.
-Omarius
Not only for use of web servers, but VPN's for buisnesses with multiple offices around a city, foget tie lines, make your own VPN with near LAN speeds for only a $1000 per office! Sounds like a great deal. I wonder if their backbone will support city to city that would allow national WAN's with solid fast access... Goodbye 128K Frame relays to remote offices, hello 100Mb!
AF-Design, web development.
My university only had 2 T1's when I was there... sigh. I think I get better throughput now with my ADSL via SpeakEasy.
it's not going to stop until you wise up, no it's not going to stop. so just give up.
Hello again- As it stands, Cogent has not lit up any client sites yet. I am a "customer" of Cogent's, I have signed up four buildings for my network. Their backbone lighting party here in Chicago was late November; they are roughly a month behind schedule.
The way they are costing out there service isn't too hard to follow. They buy dark fiber in pre-wired buildings, in cities that they already have drops to their fiber ring. Everyone here is missing something about Cogent - They are NOT reselling to home users. In fact, they don't allow colocation either! If you do not have a POP in a building they are lighting, you are out.
Someone a little farther on caught on to the main point of using the Cogent service - creating an incredibly fast VPN nationwide (US). Chicago is to have one of the first buildings lit, then NY, and last I heard building 3 is in San Fran. Nothing as of yet.
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Proftpd has had it's root hacks(less than WU ftpd)
why not NcFTPd on FreeBSD ?
(or OpenBSD if you don't want to harden the FreeBSD)
Rafi
Rafi
Rafi
(to Email replace "NOSPAM" with "meron")
I need to make a clarification. The prices set by SwitchPoint in Utah are a bit of an anomoly. They are set quite rediculously low. You aren't likely see that kind of pricing around the country... although since this technology competes with DSL and Cable Modems, the companies that deploy this will price accordingly.
(Unfortunately that's all I can really say about that. I have inside information, as I have a relative who is senior management for SwitchPoint.)
it is the perfect ingredient for a geek house/apartment, my entire apartment complex has 100Mbps for every apartment Walden Internet Village
I understand that I'm never gonna get the theoretical maximum for various reasons. The thing is that I get a fraction of my "practically possible" maximum. I think 420KBps is my about my practical maximum but when I connect to most sites (web/ftp etc.) I get speeds of around 50-70KBps, sometimes more and occasionally less. So although my connection can handle higher speeds it's other connections that slow the transfer rate down. I'm on the university fiber-optic network btw.
What Cogent seems to be doing (or, at least, what I would be doing in their case) isn't simply about providing a link to the Internet. It's about creating a "new" Internet. Well, a new network, anyway. That network will then have a link (well, links, hopefully) to the Internet to use occasionally. But if things work out for them, I think a lot of the traffic will stay on their network. Think of it as sort of a big LAN connected via a slow-ass WAN link to another network (the Internet).
After all, the company I work for doesn't need a 100Mbps for us employees to read /. But, it would be nice to use it for our branch offices in San Fran and Atlanta (domain replication, video conferencing, file sharing, transparent WAN links...)
a T1 is 190KB/s?? are you sure?
.avi in 2 minutes
i have had 350 KiloBytes on my cable, yes KBytes
a 50 MegaByte
what's going on??
A company in Utah has been deploying a fiber network for the past several years. Airswitch who just changed their name to Switchpoint is offering 100mb/s to residential customers for less than $50 per month.
Their web site ( www.airswitch.com ) is in transition, and doesn't have very much info on it right now. I remember in the past seeing that they are currently deployed in Springville and American Fork with Pleasant Grove and Orem coming online soon.
I also noticed that they just inked a deal with a company in Denver Colorado to offer service there.
People are chomping at the bit for this service. I wonder why more parts of the country aren't working faster on this.
The Fat Man Walks Alone
With my plans of running plasma fiber lines to transmit super-light-speed particles, I'll run this company into the ground. Just imagine getting data before you actually request it. It boggles the mind.
Our only hurdle is to actually observe the super-light-speed particles. If anyone is really good at seeing really fast stuff, please, by all means, let me know.
Yes please! Let him know immediately! His VC funding is about to run out!
Oh who do I think I'm kidding. We all know that all you have to do is say things like "plasma fiber lines to transmit super-light-speed particles" and you'll have VC funding for as long as you want it.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
A T1 is 1.544 megabit raw data. To get bytes, divide by 8. 1,544,000 / 8 = 193000. Not all can be used for data, as packets must be created. This does not rule out compression, which can get you more data, once uncompressed. But the actual flow is around 190k.
To get a 50 meg file in two minutes, if uncompressed, would require 25 meg a minute, or .4 meg a second.
Have you read my journal today?
Roaring Penguin is great. I've got a 386dx40 handling a 1.5mbs dsl line with no problem.
DSL and cable are faster than a t-1? no, sorry. true, you can get a 10meg cable, but there is absolutely no guarantee on what your actual speed will be. on that 10meg line the provider will put hundreds of users, so there's absolutely no way that you will get the full 10megs, or get anything even close. and the fastest speed you can get DSL is 1.54mbps. unless it's sdsl (synchronous), you're most likely not going to get the 1.54mbps, either, due to - again - oversubscription. i'm not trying to rain on your parade, nor am i praising the merits of a t-1, but i just wanted to give you some correct facts.
I was getting all kinds of problems running Verizon (BA) DSL under Windows (well, not *all* kinds of problems... but at best the connection would stay up two days). I finally threw a Linux box on the line as a server as a Masq box for my network and my uptimes have gotten MUCH better (as high as 15 days). I think Verizon's PPPoE SW is a little flakey. I've also read that there's some third party freeware Windows drivers that work a heck of a lot better as well. I wish that I could have a static IP (so I could bring my crappy little website inhouse, stream stuff to work, etc) but as of late I've gotta say the service has been pretty good.
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
The Internet may not be so fast today, but it is getting better. There are surely improvements being made to the backbone. A while ago, a T1 was considered very fast. Now regular users can get faster speeds via DSL or cable. This new technology will someday be the norm just as T1 and T3 is today. And if it's cheaper, it's a great deal for a server, ISP, etc. You may not get more than a trickle in the firehose now, but it will be very useful when the tap becomes more powerful.
A company called Yipes, which has been around for quite a while, also offers the same 1000 for $1000 deal.
Yipes Website.
I know this is mainly for businesses only, but I thought of at least one consumer application. I currently live in an apartment complex. If the owners of the complex decided to do this, they could hook up all of their apartments with high-speed Internet access for relatively cheap. The landlord can now charge a bit more for rent and list built-in super-high-speed 'Net access as a selling point.
Admit it, which of you wouldn't mind paying a bit more for an apartment with a 100Mbps connection built-in? (Yeah, yeah. I know it'd probably slow down if a lot of people were online. But even if it slowed down to 10Mbps, that'd be great.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
My only guess why they would skip Austin is the lack of large buildings. The per tenant basis would do poorly in an area where maybe only a few businesses coexist in the same building as compared to Dallas and Houston.
What most folks don't understand is that a 10Mbps link is a THEORETICAL MAX! Your never going to see it even in a limited envirornment let alone on an internet connection. Any ethernet-like protocol is contention based which means devices share the same pipe and use the bandwidth thats there. Even in a Reservation based protocol like token ring the Max throughput is tuff to get to because of things like latence, network errors, and repeater, switch and router performance. The max you'll ever see is around 80% and thats would be when no other devices were using the network. On any sort of public network this is NEVER going to happen. You will always have broadcasts, ARPs, router messaging, DHCP, SNMP, and any number of other various packets flowing through the network. 420KBps from any site on the internet is great. I'm guessing your using a cable modem type of access... and although your provider can possibly increase availible network bandwidth by implementing a certain level of port blocking to restrict protocals like SMB and others from improperly configured machines, the more blocks they put on means the more filters that a packet compared against before being passed through to your computer or the network. This adds more latency. So you see its a balancing act.
Although the theroretical world is fun to play in, most of us are forced to work in the real world.
Thank God my university doesn't poke me in the ass when it comes to our net connect. For $30,000 a year they BETTER have an OC-3
Good god, that's a lot of bandwidth. For once, I don't think the linked site will be slashdotted to its knees.
The Linksys *IS* a Linux box. When you telnet into the RT311/314 box, hit option 99 and then there is an option on the menu to pull up a shell session. I know that's not exactly what you meant by Linux box, but it's a point that's worht mentioning.
Sure you sit on one (OC-192). but your not getting anything greater than you 10mbps enet connection on you LAN. Im sure you never dnload anything of the net faster than 400kbps.
You have no clue man, I download stuff all the time on my 10mb lan connected though 3 oc-3's at 900kbps all the time. Fact done, proof, perioud.
For those of you that don't know, Vancouver, Canada has the cheapest bandwidth in North America.
Group Telecom has been selling 100Mbps co-location at $1000 US/month for the last two years, and if you want an internet feed at your location with the same bandwidth, it will be around $1400 US/month.
The building I live in has built-in ethernet, I pay $20 us/month for a switched 10Mbps feed.
My collage has pictures from cigarette ads, and
Cyndi Lauper. Unfortunately, I can't run a q3
server off of my collage, and when I tried, I got
glue all up in my NIC.
how much do your parents pay?
Cogent uses (or, more precisely, plans to use) deep wave division multiplexing which does indeed lend credibility to their claims of 100 Mbps on the MAN. However, their claims of "non oversubcribed bandwidth" are patently silly. Even on a 2 gbps peering point they could only serve 20 customers and the number of gigabit peers (or Internet backbones) is still pretty small. Also, the wholesale price of bandwidth for non tier-1 ISPs (they aren't a tier 1) is between $200 and $500 per meg depending on volume. They are not sending you $20,000 - $50,000 in bandwidth for $1000 a month. Sorry. World doesn't work like that.
Also, they are an in-buidling provider of the same type as Allied Riser (ticker: ARCC) and Cypress Communications (ticker: CYCO). Both of those companies have had 10 mbps Ethernet (10bFX, 10bT, or 10b2 believe it or not -- and you thought coax was dead...) offerings for over a year now and, if you look at the charts, can't make ends meet even with oversubscription. Cogent's proposal is even more silly.
The Cogent plan is great if your offices are all on the same MAN and most of your traffic is bound for those offices. Otherwise, you can send 100 megabits out to some peering point where it will be dropped in the congestion.
Also, I invite anyone to call Cogent and ask for a customer list. The last write up I saw of them or Yipes! had one guy with a T1 saying he'd like to buy a line from them when the service is available. It isn't.
Sorry. Didn't mean to rant, but people with claims like this discredit providers with real services (and business plans) and do a lot to confuse the public.
I've been getting 100mbps for a while at my home for about $45 / mo. I could get it for $20 but I wanted a public IP address. The company basically runs cat 5 underground right up to your home and puts optics where it's needed. Right now my whole city is wired for it and a few of the surrounding cities are being worked on for it. They also have a cheap plan for industrial areas. SwitchPoint
As I've said before, I've talked to cogent before. They spent alot of money on dark fiber and infrastucture. So what! Who cares!! They've got lots of hopes and little reality. What they can't solve is the last mile problem. Sure you can get dark fiber to a few select business districts, but what about getting it from the curb to the MPOE in the building? Where are they going to place their equipment? In short, their buisness model does not matter much until they secure or buy a great deal of access agreements, to which, real estate people love money more than access.
Additionally, I'm happy for them for (supposedly) doing something new with gigabit backbone, but even if they have it, there are bigger issues. Out of curriosity, where are their peering points? Are they a part of the big boy backbone networks that act like they own the net? Who's currently hosted on their backbone that you'd want to get to?
If they were wise, they'd charge a lot more and sell themselves as a superior vlan/vpn provider. I'm sick of hearing about them: all cisco hype and no bite... and let's be careful about the free advertising pretending to be a breakthrough guys. Thanks.
"Hearing all the words of many others, doesn't make a difference when they're wrong."
-King's X
Democrats and Republicans only disagree about how to enslave you
Technical Contact:
Network Operationc Center (NO2032-ORG) noc@COGENTCO.COM
Cogent Communications
1015 31st Street, NW Suite 330
Washington , DC 20007
US
+1 877 7COGENT Fax- +1 202 295 4217
....
GATEKEEPER.COGENTCO.COM 206.64.112.115
MONET.TITANIA.NET 209.207.60.17
.....
cogentco.com name server hydrogen.cogentco.com
cogentco.com name server gatekeeper.cogentco.com
cogentco.com name server monet.titania.net
cogentco.com name server sesamestreet.cogentco.com
sesamestreet.cogentco.com has address 10.0.6.1
lithium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.170
carbon.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.173
helium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.169
hydrogen.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.168
sodium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.178
almandine.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.9
allemontite.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.8
beryllium.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.171
oracle.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.193
aluminite.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.11
nitrogen.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.174
gatekeeper.cogentco.com has address 206.64.112.115
vjklein.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.129
oxygen.cogentco.com has address 192.168.168.175
.......
Hooray for the Network Operationc Center!
Hooray for Highly skilled network chemists!
Hooray for non-routable RFC 1918 address space!
Top notch operation. I'm investing, and retiring at 25.
However, the problem came when we tried to access any resource outside @Home's wires. In Connecticut, they hadn't installed enough connectivity to serve the number of users that they'd signed up. Another fellow started the CT@Home Users' Group, and we squeaked until the grease came in the form of another T3.
The upload cap isn't to preserve capacity. It's to make it unusable for commercial purposes. @Home techs told me many times that people were using the service to host their little website business or ISP. So, instead of kicking them off and losing their revenue, they just put a cap in place. The people who weren't "abusing" it weren't supposed to notice. (Too bad if they did.)
There is so much bandwidth available in a modern cable plant it's not funny. My current provider (Comcast in South Carolina) would absolutely love to make paying use of all their capacity, but there's these damn people that insist on not signing up for this wonderful digital-cable thing. The cretins. That means they have to double up on a lot of TV channels, when each channel is actually capable of over 60 MBit/second.
Yes, cheap cablemodems will likely have issues. A good device (like a Cisco) will handle it just fine, you get what you pay for. I just want @Home to actually deliver the service they teased us with -- @Home Pro:
- Host your own domain!
- Servers are okay!
- REALLY! It's not vapor! (Yeah, right.)
The original point of all this was to say "Peer with Cogent, plug into their fiber, and solve the capacity issues." There's enough capacity there to make a 1 MBit cap feasible. Heck, I'd spring for a Cogent connection myself -- and damn the cablemodem!"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
As for PPoE, use the Linksys DSL/Cable router. It is PPoE capable and does the log-in for you, automatically, on-demand. Then use it for DHCP, plug in your machine, and you're ready to go. This is excellent for notebooks. I always insist on setting up DHCP wherever I go with my notebook so I don't have to do anything for configuration. The last thing I want to do is to set up PPoE to use a network that I only use on occassion. With the Linksys box, it's really easy to do. Also, you get the benefit of a firewall, which is a must-have these days.
Please contact me with any questions of concerns I am a Wholesale Account Manager for Cogent. 646-495-5384 Michael
What a bargain!! Here in Lima, Peru we use to pay US$ 700 for a lousy 64 kb access to Internet thru an even worse Frame Relay. US$1000 even for a E1 could be a great deal here.
But can anyone find a link on cogent's website that shows which apartments/cities/etc. are getting hooked up with them? A cookie if you find it! :)
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
What couldn't you stream over this SOB?
:-)
Realistic (as in, indistinguishable from a regular video camera picture of a real scene) computer generated gaming scenes would take about an order of magnitude more bandwidth. Since you asked...
Oracle and unix guy.
Upgraded Communication Equipment and Service -
Cogent will upgrade your building's telecommunications system by bringing fiber to your telecom room, while taking up only a 3' x 3' x 7' high space and using the existing Category 5 wiring in your risers. Initially, Cogent will provide up to 5 gigabits per second access to your building. As new multiplexing technologies become available, Cogent will be able to upgrade your building and increase access speed by simply inserting the latest hardware card into our equipment.
Wouldn't that be nice to have!!!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
This is great stuff, but alas, only large companies, the government, or Universities can really enjoy the benefit if optical OC-192 right now, since in order to talk to a computer on the other side of the country at that speed, that computer must also be "speaking" that fast. Hence you need not one, but at least two of these $1000 a month deals to really jumpstart your network. And then, of course, you'd only be talking to yourself or some of the few other organizations who A: have this service and B: are willing to communicate with you. This is great for businesses and research facilities (Parallel computation!!), but even the wealthiest of us maverick internet users will not be downloading mp3s at 100Mbps.
Can't remember the other slashdot article, but it seems to me you have to pay through the nose if you're a small carrier looking to set up a private peering arangment. At $1000 a month for rougly two T3's, can cogent really set up any peering arangements besides the Public Peering Points?
Reading further in their web site it says that the $1,000 per month is per tenant. Which would mean that each tenant in a 100Mbps-wired apartment complex would have to foot a $1,000 a month Internet bill.
However, think of what this could do for poor school districts and Internet access. Get a grant or find a rich philanthropist and you could hook up the entire school with high-speed Internet access for relatively little.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Cogent is useing WCG fiber for thier backbone, another company in the same $1000 per 100Meg connection business is Yipes!. The basis for this business plan is quite simple: Crossconnects for T based services are expensive and difficult to maintain. Ethernet is cheap and easy to maintain. By elimintating the whole 'telco style' cross connect system, you can save a HUGE amount of money. Yipes! seems to be smart enough to relize they need to be able to charge on a per meg notch, and are using 'smart' ethernet switches (I think Extreme) to handle provisioning and bandwidth control. Cogent is doing something similar. Both these companies have a sound plan, they have rubbed thier crystal balls and seen into the future. They have both made the mental leap of faith required. Now it's just a matter of who can grow it the fastest.
My understanding, from talking to people who buy bandwidth for a living, is that Cogent is way, way, underprovisioned for transit for their bandwidth, but that their backbone provisioning is OK. What this means is that, if you are doing data transfers within Cogent's network, you're OK, but if you expect to download at the promised speed from another network (highly likely with, say, web trafic), you'll be disappointed.
...From a strictly business standpoint, I don't see how they can affoard to undercut the other CLECs like that! Our local fiber provider wants to charge us $4k/mo. for a DS-3 (T3)... how can they do that?
Does anyone knoe more about the company?
-C
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
100Mbps... wow! Can you even look at pr0n that fast?
A T1 is approximately 190 kilobytes a second. This would be approximately 12.5 megabytes a second, over sixty times faster than a T1.
Have you read my journal today?
To All, What you are reading is all true!!! Cogent Communications (www.cogentco.com) offers 100 MBPS of Internet access for $1000 per month all via fiber optics. We also offer a 1 Gig connection for $10,000 per month all via fiber optics. Our backbone runs at the OC-192 level and we have well over 100 public and private peers in place. If you would like more information feel free to contact me at 917.679.5297. Evan Gillman Cogent Communications NY Sales
You mean dense wave division multiplexing? Or something else? DWMP means shooting different "colors" of laser light down the glass. You then have a filter at the other end which separates the colors back out. Just like a prism does for sunlight.... Pretty cool tech, when dwmp stuff gets reasonable we will see an explosion in bandwidth! That and fully optical routers.....
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Sounds like one of the major pieces of a geek house. the fast, (sorta) cheap internet access. however, I cant complain, as I sit on an OC48 at work all the time :)
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
"The Linksys *IS* a Linux box. When you telnet into the RT311/314 box,..."
- -- --
umm, I believe you're thinking about the Netgear Internet Routers (http://www.netgear.com/routers_main.asp).
They are not bad routers. The RT311 is just the router, whereas the RT314 has the built in 10/100 4-port switch.
-----------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------
"That government is best which governs
I'm checking them out...
And colocation with 24/7 T3 usage is going to cost a little bit more than $45/month. =)
Are you going to install a MAN ring around the Boston area anytime soon? As you might know, Boston is a highly dense metropolitan area with a booming economy. It would make a LOT of sense to hook it up ASAP (ok so i'm pandering you for a hookup, but hey, all the stuff i've said is true :P)
That's nice, but what's the point? Unless you are exchanging data with someone else on that backbone, you're never going to get even close to using that bandwidth. The Internet is just too slow. It's like hooking up your standard outdoor tap to a firehose.
It's unlikely to offer much value over DSL, Cable-modems, etc. to Jo Average EbayAddict.
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Count it per byte. Based on the figures quoted, a T1 is 12 times as expensive. Contrary to myth, a T1 is not "unlimited bandwidth".
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Not here, thats for sure
Bastard moderators jealous of my karma! MOD THIS DOWN THEN YOU FLABBY GEEK!!!!
Co-location is a lot more expensive than $45/ month. I pay £20,000 a year for a 10Mb pipe and £8,000 a year per full rack @ an SLA of 99.850% uptime. If you know of better value, let me know.
"I've also read that there's some third party freeware Windows drivers that work a heck of a lot better as well"
;) It's not a kernel solution, but it can easily act as a router for a 1mbs connection on a 486.
Like RASPPPOE? It's free. It's small. It integrates nicely with Windows.
Roaring Penguin is the best PPPoE client I've used, and it's a UNIX (Linux, *BSD, etc) client. The author subscribes to the same ISP as me
Personally, I bought myself a Netgear RT314 router. I don't worry about PPPoE anymore.
Use Yipes! in houston. They have a very similar deal.
This was posted before by timmy. Article here.
i'm a girl. i've been to LAN parties. whats wrong with that?
1) Go to www.cogentco.com.
2) Note "100 Mbps for $1000/Month banner on the right side.
3) Click on Wholesalers next to "I Want Cogent Access" on the menu
4) Watch the banner change to "100 Mbps for $3000/Month"
You expect people to drop their prices.. but
cut them to third?
This sounds nice, from the page,
This congfiguration (sic) enables Cogent to offer each customer a fully dedicated, non-oversubscribed 100 Mbps connection that is not shared with anyone else...
What couldn't you stream over this SOB?
sm
Slashdot: The All-Vapor Network
I live next to an ice cream manufacturing plant, and they apparantly have some T1s running in the same bundle, causing some nasty interferance at the higher (768 or so) frequencies, so the line has a tendancy to go out of sync quite a bit.
-s
.foo.
WARNING!!! THIS WAS PERFORMED ON A TEST MACHINE BY A PROFESSIONAL REGEDIT STUNTMAN. PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT THIS @HOME!!! HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Class\NetTrans\0001\
Right-click to add a new STRING VALUE called MaxMTU. Right-click to modify and enter 1492 as the Value data.
Re-f@*king boot for some stupid reason...
Please stop APK.. you're only hurting yourself.
Does anyone remember reading about this a while back?
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Okay, I know there are better uses for bandwidth like this, but there are times when @Home really gets on my nerves -- like last night!
With all the incredible potential of the internet, using @Home is like trying to have a conversation with duct tape over your mouth... the only thing they want you to do is listen. God forbid you might actually have something to say.
(For the curious, @Home's webspace runs off Apache, and what feels like a 33.6 modem! That's what has me ticked.)
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
I'd just use a phone like. 56k is all one person needs. Sometimes I like to use the 14.4. Some other times I'll even hack my modem to get a lower bps....like once my max bps was .009975.
Just use a phone line...
I always thought that college was a place that sold 100Mbps internet access for $1000 a month... And it came with free live-motion chicks viewable through the window panel on my wall. I don't know if they were real though; never went outside my room. Of course I am of that select population that would, when given the option of a date and a LAN party, pick the latter. And if there are girls at the LAN party, it counts as a date, right?
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
To AC, Welcome to Cogent's network!! It gives us great pleasure to see companies like yours revolutionizing the way that they do business as a result of our network. Evan Gillman Cogent Communications NY Sales egillman@cogentco.com 917.679.5297
Maybe I can get an account there! Fast Internet would only be my transatlantic phonecall away!
Somebody wake me when they reach Europe, Please?
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
http://www.ieng.com/warp/public/146/pressroom/2000 /mar00/sp_030600.htm l ? ID=2510
http://www.jvp.co.il/investments/optical_port.htm
http://company.monster.co.uk/cocouk/
http://www.individualinvestor.com/tbd/article.asp
--- And there it is. ---
Did any one catch that the company was located in DC? I'm not sure if I'd want to host with a company located in the same provincial neighborhood as say... the Pentagon. I would live in fear of Carnivore sitting there mointoring all of the traffic that came through.
This back bone that they speak of. Privately funded? Out of DC? Hmmm. Where did they get the money to run a pipe out our nations capital?
a/s/l here. Sorry, adding domain tags to your s
Okay... I'm going to submit this as an article, but I thought I would write here first... just in case it doesn't get posted.
This submission was interesting, but people around here would be far more interested in what SwitchPoint Networks is doing. They're offering 100Mbs (synchronous) service to residential customers for about the price of ADSL. They already have live customers in Utah. They recently signed a deal with Wide Open West to start deploying this technology on a wider scale.
So, if you're really interested in getting proper "broadband" capabilities, these are the folks you need to talk to. (Well... actually they're a technology company, they don't build the networks anymore. So tell your friendly neighborhood overbuilder to start using their technology.)
Hi!
What Cogent is doing is part of a small but growing phenomenon--commonly called "metropolitan area networking." The basic idea is to wire a densely-populated area like a campus network--connecting to the larger Internet through a few gateways just like a university or corporate network would. The benefits of doing this are reasonably obvious: wiring an entire "campus" at once represents a single construction project, rather than becoming a years-long incremental installation of line after line after line. Typically the network service is provided with an Ethernet switch rather than a router--the host "Ethernet service provider" typically will also offer network management services for network participants.
Another emerging provider of MANs is 3rd Wire, which is presently in discussions to wire the downtown "Digital District" in Allentown, Pennsylvania. 3rd Wire is publicly indicating that they expect bandwidth costs to drop dramatically over the next 5 years--they expect to provide bandwidth within the Allentown Digital District at approximately $400/GB within a year, and their business model projects that price to drop to roughly $50/GB of bandwidth in five years.
Mind blowing? What they're doing--and they are by no means the only people doing this--is seeing that there is critical mass in providing fiber in that "last mile" to the end user. And they're being helped, in part, by communities that recognize that "urban infrastructure" in the 21st century will require bandwidth just as much as it requires paved roads and traffic signals. Those communities are actively working to bring in providers to wire their communities--reasoning (entirely correctly) that high-tech firms are going to gravitate to cities with gigabit bandwidth for sub-K bucks.
Incidentally, several posters have mentioned that this is meant "for business only"--not so. Certainly the Allentown Digital District very much wants to use the metropolitan area network to revitalize business in downtown Allentown--but we also want to encourage urban redevelopment in the surrounding neighborhoods with the offer of dramatic bandwidth for small dollars. If you can live and work a couple of blocks apart, and have gigibit Ethernet at home and at work, wouldn't that be attractive? We think it will be.
Full disclosure: I'm heavily involved with the Lehigh Valley Partnership and the Allentown Digital District.
do they sell this in I-V form? maybe they can hook it into my brainstem instead...
this kind of bandwith sounds seriously amazing. i hope they deliver.
-----
# cd /
I agree the Linksys router with built-in PPPoE support is a godsend for us underlings with Verizon DSL-only when it works. My Linksys router will work flawlessly for days and then just freeze-and the only solution is to reboot. Back when I was using Bell Atlantic DSL with static IP service (pre-Verizon days); I had a Linux box doing MASQ, and needless to say, it was never down. Not so with the Linksys, but it comes very close to being perfect.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
The program is managed by, you guessed it, Palo Alto's public utilities department. The same department installed a fiber ring throughout the city some years ago and licenses "dark fiber" (just the banwidth, ma'am) to anyone who wants to pay the drop charges plus $2,700/FMY (fiber-mile-year).
Roaring Penguin is what I've got on my router. Great little program. Rock solid!
If you don't have anything nice to say, say it often.
- Ed the Sock
For all the people asking if they REALLY can keep that level of bandwidth going, it looks like they can. From their faq page:
The Cogent Communications Network is a facilities based, end-to-end optical system. We have metropolitan OC48 rings in 20 major cities tied together via a national backbone designed to operate at OC192 speeds implementing an IP over Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) Cisco Powered Network.
20 OC48's would keep up very nicely.
Now, my question is what kind of money do they want for the install?
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
For a start, that's co-location. Secondly, you have to supply your own hardware, and some places have restrictions on the type of OS you can run (You'll be connected to their network remember). Third, it costs more than $45 a month. Fourth, it's not much use if you're still on a DSL line at home.
So, stop trying to get in an early post & gain some "Interesting" mod points.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
The idea was conceived and initially developed by a team of engineers and support staff from the Australian Capital Territory's electricity and water utility.
The TransACT cable will be supported on the existing power poles, with optical fibre being taken to within 300 metres of each home or business, and in most cases much less. High quality copper cable will be connected over the last few metres giving each home or business a dedicated 52 megabit asymmetrical connection.
Apparently it is an "open" network with all content providers welcomed. They claim 52Mbps to SOHO users using VDSL
According to an interview with the CEO in the trade magazine "Comms World" TransACT will be offering telephony, data and video on the one network. Pricing for all three taken together will around the A$149 per month Damn I wish I lved there !
Life is just a bowl of All Bran - Small Faces
Its called MY UNIVERSITY. They take a yearlly rate of US $30,000.
Is this supposed to be $1,000 a month for a home user? I don't know how many home users are going to fork out that much money. $12,000 a year...that's a lot. That's more than my rent and car payments combined. I hope they had more in mind than this when they set up their "fiber optic network across the US."
On the other hand, if this were available (and I were willing to pay), I wouldn't have to waste my time and money with a measley T1.
It's probably not an issue for me anyway...the Detroit area seems like it's always the last major metropolitan area to get anything like that. Yep, just checked...no detroit as usual.
I guess I can cope with my $40/month cable modem.
"It is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."
Time is fun when you're having flies.
-Kermit the Frog
That's 100x (roughly) the bandwidth of a T-1 for 1/2 the price (again, roughly). Apparently you don't need some funkoid router interface either, according to the website it terminates in an rj45. To sweeten the deal, it looks like they'll even cover the cost of bringing it to your building.
On the downside of course, is that it looks like this is Businesses Only. This really only makes sense, given the cost structure they have in place (where they cover pretty much all of the "last mile" installation costs (leaving you the building owner to cover the comparatively minor in-building ehternet instaaltion cost (minor unless you have an old building anyway)) and derive their all their income from the monthly payment). Looking at their "Property Owner..." section, it looks like the $1000/mo. is on a per tenant basis (still a good deal for the tenants compared to each getting a T-1), and by running one wire to a house you'd only get $1K/mo as opposed to (n tenants)*$1k/mo for one wire to an office complex.
This would potentially be a very good deal for local ISPs in cities they offer service in. Anything that helps the "little guys" blossom is good, because I fear the day that AOL-TW and the Baby Bells are the only ISPs left.
One last tangental point is that it seems their illustrator doesn't know Texas that well (Dallas is practically in Tyler's lap on the network map, :-) ). (Thinking of texas, why did they hit Houston and Dallas but miss Austin? Austin has a POP from pretty much every other big and medium size bandwidth provider, and given the large tech market here and whatnot I still doubt we've reached any saturation point in connectivity.)
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Just remember to do your research before investing in a high-speed ISP. Verizon DSL is an ultimate failure; they promise speeds up to 640kbps, while some customers (who are VERY close to the CO) are only getting 26kbps
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer