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Fiber to the Home in Japan
Ranma sent in this story about a 100Mbps (!) consumer internet service being offered in Japan. Cost: US $40.00/month. Hmmm. I pay more than that for 384K DSL. See also Germany, which is apparently actually offering the much-promised but little-seen internet access over power lines.
Back when I worked at a power company that also ran an ISP over dial up lines, we investigated Internet over powerlines.
It works in europe well because they run a hundred houses off of one transformer.
In the United States there is usually one transformer on every street block (4-7 houses).
The transmission of data gets mangled at the Transformer and so the costs go up in equipment.
... pretty soon you're talking real space. --paraphrased
Remember the unit discrepancy; hard drive "gigs" are measured in "billion bytes" formatted capacity, not the usual powers-of-two "gigs" that we talk about in memory or bus speeds. Lastly, the effective "baud" vs the actual data that gets through. Hard to do the math after so many definitions of "bits."
If you took '10 gigs' and '8 gigs' as the numbers on the outside of the hard drive packaging, you have 18 BB (billion bytes), or 144 Bb (billion bits) of actual stuff you could serve. (144 Gb is actually 144*1024^3, or 154,618,822,656 bits.)
The effective baud is harder; it depends on the protocols and the transport. RS232 has 'stop bits' and such; this makes it about 10 bits of time per effective byte transferred. Ethernet has less per byte, but big packets get wrapped in smaller datagrams with sequencing data. Tunneling takes more data wrapping, and so on.
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Anyone else find it kind of ironic that the site's been slashdotted?
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let's see...
8 gigs here...
10 gigs there...
at 100 Mbps...
that's, 18 gigs...
or 144 gigabits...
144 gigabits divided by 100 megabits per second...
hmm...
24 minutes...
I think I need some bigger drives!
Usen offers 100Mbps connection for consumers
Chieko Tashiro
Friday, March 23, 2001 at 18:00 JST
TOKYO -- Usen corporation, a Tokyo based cable radio company, started the world's fastest Internet connection service from March 1. At a top speed of 100Mbps Usen is targeting the average consumer via its fiber-optic cables.
Atsushi Fujimoto, broadband business planning director of Usen, demonstrated the 100Mbps connection for Japan Today and explained, "At 100Mbps connection, when you are downloading a game file that is 121MB it takes only 20-30 seconds instead of waiting the 10-12 hours it takes on the 64Kbps ISDN connection common to many Japanese households.
The monthly service charge is Y4,900 a month, plus another Y900 per month for Usen's special modem. Installing charges run to Y30,000.
It may sound irresistible, but not all agree.
"It is wrong to take a look at a 100M bps connection and consider it the best service," says Takashi Hosoya of Jupiter Communications, a market research company.
The Internet needs to be considered in total, says Hosoya -- the backbone, upstream, and downstream conditions. Even if downstream is 100M bps the backbone may not good enough, slowing everything down.
He also points that Usen's broadband service may be aimed only at pushing Usen's cost contents.
To install the service, Usen will add a fibre optic line alongside your phone line. That line will then be connected to Usen's fiber optic utility pole which then hooks through to the Usen's Shibuya office, and the Internet.
Users can then access Usen's portal site where you can download games and Karaoke songs. Usen is working to provide more content for users.
Currently, Usen services the Shibuya and Setagaya areas of Tokyo. In April, Tokyo's Suginami, Meguro, Ota areas will be added.
Then, in October, Tokyo's 23 wards will be able to access the service. From April 2003, Usen will provide the service to all major cities in Japan.
Andrew Shuttleworth, president of the Tokyo PC Users Group said, "Y4,900 is a very low monthly charge. Users will appreciate the service."
Daiwa Institute of Research's analyst Shinji Moriyuki thinks the key for Usen is to spray the service area wide as soon as possible. He says, "Usen may serve many users' needs. If users have faster connections, there are many more things they can do and create online. If anyone, any one company wants a high speed connection with inexpensive fees, Usen's service will help."
Another thing that is also good about this service is the service subscribers can connect to a high speed Internet 24x7.
Many Japanese Internet users connect to the Internet and download emails and then disconnect. Well trained as they are, by years of NTT charging 10 yen for every three minutes spent on line.
Shuttleworth says, "At the moment many Japanese users connect to download their mail and then disconnect as soon as possible, even if they have a flat rate connection like Flets ISDN. As these services spread the mindset will change so that people think of the Internet as an 'always on' service."
Daiwa's Moriyuki thinks the Usen service will increase competition. "The service will motivate the industry to grow. However, it all depends on the user's need for the Internet."
Gartner Group's broadband analyst, Yuko Adachi, thinks any change to Japan's Internet scene will take at least a year. "Until Usen can provide the service nationwide there won't be much difference. Plus, the service is consumer targeted, and many applications for consumer don't need speeds of 100Mbps."
In fact, NTT East's PR department said, "We are currently providing a 10Mbps test service, and hopefully this spring we will also provide a 100Mbps service." However, the date for the service's start has not been announced.
Shuttleworth also agrees there will be more competition. "Of course NTT and other companies will work to provide the same kind of service."
For personal users, Moriyuki says, "Some might not know what to do with 100Mbps, many only need 10Mbps."
Shuttleworth's opinion differs. "In Japan, many advanced device are being developed, such as TVs which can connect to the Internet and PCs with TV tuners. With those, users will be downloading videos and then when they realise they need a faster connection, they will look for it. Also, once they realise there are faster connections, users will soon start finding out the new things they can do through the 'net."
Usen is aiming for 15,000 subscribers in the first year. By August 2003, they hope to have 1 million subscribers and 2 million subscribers by August 2005.
Asked how customers have responded to the first two weeks of service Usen's Fujimoto says, "Users are impressed with the speed and the vivid graphics that make using the Internet almost like watching TV."
> But, here in Canada? We've got a population density of 3.3 people per frigging kilometre! How do you affordably link the 3.3 people in each of those square kilometres with fibre, especially given that many of them are separated by waterways?
Most of us are concentrated along the US border, and just like any other western industrial country the vast majority of us live in big metropolitan areas (which already has the cheapest 1Mbit DSL in the world, $40 CDN). Even in Saskatchewan, half of everyone is in the two main cities.
>I don't see how those in Canada's north will soon join the digital revolution.
Same way we got electricity and telephones to the farms.
Here's a question: I know that the DSL used in Canada has a range of 5km from the telco, that could cover a lot of farms right there. (Of course first you need a bit of bandwidth going to the small towns.) Has anyone heard anything about the actual technical or economic issues involved with trying DSL to farms? (Pretend there aren't any party lines still in use..)
"640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anybody."
This is much easier to do in someplace like japan where there isnt as much space in a city. To run fibre to your home in Japan isnt much fibre at all. To do this someplace like Houston would require running miles upon miles of fibre, raising the price considerably. Being dense does have its advantages.
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
Japan, our original example has a population density of approximately 335 people/sq km.
The United States has a bit of a harder time, with a population density of approximately of approximately 28 people/sq km.
But, here in Canada? We've got a population density of 3.3 people per frigging kilometre! How do you affordably link the 3.3 people in each of those square kilometres with fibre, especially given that many of them are separated by waterways?
Unless satellite access makes great strides, I don't see how those in Canada's north will soon join the digital revolution.
(these statistics were taken from Britannica.com)
They can offer high speed for low cost because the maximum cable length is going to be what, 3 miles?
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324006
Data communications over power lines is nothing new. In the UK Norweb were trialling this back in about '98. A lot of urban legends were started back then about being able to snarf people's traffic from hanging around street lighting. It looked very promising at the time, and a lot of people got very excited.
Norweb got into bed with Nortel, seeked and received EU approval to trial the system and they started offering access to schools around Manchester as well as some homes. It was called DPL (Direct Power Line) and provided 1 megabit of data symmetrically. The project was cancelled after "unsatisfactory results" but I can find no reference on-line as what the precise nature was. I seem to recall seeing an article in New Scientist that suggested the amount of noise on the power lines caused huge problems when trying to get the signal across distances any greater than one side of a lab to another. In addition, back in 1999 BT had announced ADSL and was then talking about speeds of 10Mb/sec (which haven't materialised) and many suspected that was a major cause of the project being scrapped.
This line intentionally left here to annoy you.
1) it will not happen in the us for a long long long LONG time. This is part of the "last mile" problem that telcos isps, pretty much everyone and their dog has been wondering about for the last umm ever. there was a compnay in houston that was planning on pushing fiber to the door... but not serving as an ISP - only the physical connect to the telco. 2) to build an infastructure like that is very expensive and time consuming, not to mention that when you drive dowtown - that orange paint on the road with those little arrows means that fiber is going in, and you won't be able to drive anywhere anymore. 3) ISP powerline stuff is a great idea, the network is pretty much built, but running fiber from pole to pole is not a good idea, that's why a vast majority of it is burried in the ground. with the way the economy is now, the fact that telcos, IXC's etc... are now pretty much being punished by the same people that financed them a little while back - no one is going to build anything super great like this... not for a long long time. there are other issues (legal) surrounding last mile as well.... from a business stance on USEN, they should have rolled out with a 10mbs and a 100mbs service, offering the allusion of choice to the customer, and they still could have charged the US$40 for 10mbs.
-deuxdrop